Should You Still Use WordPress in 2027?

These exact social posts have been all over LinkedIn for months:

You don’t need WordPress anymore.

WordPress is dead.

AI means we can move away from website builders like WordPress.

All of these posts make the same argument. AI has come and any idiot can spin up a website, so we don’t need complicated systems like WordPress anymore.

Is that actually true? As a marketing director, you need to know that whatever you invest in for your next website is going to be the right decision. WordPress is still the leader in website builders and offers the best built-in accessibility, SEO, and future-proof options for teams looking to grow over the next several years.

But if you’ve read any of those posts or have met with agencies that told you they’ve “moved away from WordPress,” let’s talk about why they have. And why that may not be the right decision for you.

Just to be super upfront: I hate AI. I use the tool only to create outlines for articles like this one, because I struggle with how to order things. Even then, I end up changing about 80% of what it gives me, but it’s a half-decent starting point. AI really only works if you are an expert in whatever you’re asking it to do for you. Otherwise, as one of my colleagues says, it just magnifies whatever stupidity you put into it.

I understand why many website agencies feel like they’ll get left behind if they don’t adopt AI, but it can be a huge disservice to their customers if they rely on it too heavily. Remember how I said it magnifies your stupidity? If I asked it tax questions (in which I am really dumb), it would give me the wrong answers. Then I would go and do my taxes with that incorrect information and end up in a world of trouble. When we rely on it to do our thinking or research for us, it rarely ends well.

But enough ranting. AI websites seem like a great idea. This machine can do in seconds what would take you hours. Fantastic right?

It’s not as simple as all that.

For one, many AI tools have exploded in price. What was free or inexpensive just a few months ago can end up costing you thousands of dollars by the time the project is done.

If you’ve been getting quotes for AI websites, though, let’s talk about their downsides.

As we work on websites with customers, they obviously want to make changes, swap images, adjust the design, or change up the content. With WordPress, Squarespace, Wix, and ShowIt, all of these things are easy to do.

Most AI websites are built in regular HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. They have no admin backend for simple changes. Instead, you’d either need to directly edit the code or “talk” to the chatbot to get it to do it. Prompt it incorrectly, or if someone inexperienced edits the code directly, you can break your live website. For most marketing teams, that’s a nightmare scenario, but it’s all too real.

It doesn’t remove your reliance on your web development team; it actually increases it.

AI’s output is only as good as the prompt. If an experienced coder is asking it to build a website, they can adjust the prompts to ensure it uses semantic HTML, proper syntax, and secure code. Unfortunately for you, I’ve read many, many Reddit posts from “new” agency owners that want to build entire businesses around AI websites. They’ve never built a website before. Or worse, an agency has downsized their development team and replaced human experts with computers, hoping that the designer can oversee what it creates.

You want to own your website. I mean, truly own it. Your company’s website should have a copyright notice and date in the footer of every single page of your website. This protects you from intellectual property theft and other scary things.

In the US, copyright requires human authorship. You can copyright AI-generated work only if “a human author makes creative arrangements or modifications of the output.” That does not include writing the prompts.

Basically, enough of whatever AI output has to have been changed by a human to be copyrightable. If that’s not happening, you don’t own your website. Which is your core marketing piece.

You know how annoyed everyone is with the AI flyers small businesses use? They all look the same with messy designs and unrealistic pictures.

AI websites are the same. Before you say, “Ok, but there are web design trends and it’s common for many websites to feel the same,” I mean same same.

Just swap in your own colors and you, too, can have a website that looks exactly like everyone’s, down to the weird, distracting bordered eyebrow text. (Note: these took me two seconds of Googling. Please go look at Google Images to get the full picture)

This makes the fact that you can’t copyright your website or design even more complicated. Where now, if someone were to duplicate your website in full, you’d have legal recourse. With AI websites, it’s literally impossible, because they all have the same website, too.

One of the most pervasive answers for AI websites over WordPress is that WordPress sites are slow. They’re filled with so much unnecessary code and tools that you just don’t need. You can build an AI website to be exactly what you want and need. That’s great, right?

What a lot of these AI-forward experts fail to understand is that it’s always been a capability with WordPress, too. You have to be careful about what theme you select (we’d always suggest custom over an out-of-the-box one), but at its core, WordPress is pretty lean. Bloated sites come from non-developers building websites with premium themes and more plugins than any site should run because they don’t know how to code in PHP.

Over the last few years, WordPress core has done a lot of work to clean up bloat with the shift to native block editors. While these aren’t my favorite, they are much faster than what old themes were creating. Many older themes also broke basic WordPress functionality to get the result they wanted, which caused problems whenever there were updates.

You can absolutely build a WordPress website that’s bloated, slow, and insecure. But if your website agency approaches it correctly, that won’t be an issue.

Launched in May 2003, WordPress began as an open-source blogging platform. With its historical focus on helping bloggers rank on search engines, it still has some of the best built-in SEO architecture of any website platform.

While this depends on the theme, the native site structure has always used semantic HTML, too. That also means it has great web accessibility out of the box.

Your theme or builder will affect this, and you will still need to install an SEO plugin like Yoast, but it’s hard to beat a good WordPress website for SEO, UX, and accessibility.

On the other hand, AI tools are notoriously bad at writing HTML. Unless you have a developer who feeds in the correct parameters or fixes the code, you can have a messy website that cannot be read by assistive tools, search engines, or even other AI searches.

Perhaps one of the most important things to consider when choosing a website platform: who is going to help you later? You’ll see articles that talk about its decline in market share, but WordPress still powers 40.7% of the internet. While that is a dip from its high a few years ago, it’s still the industry leader by far. It’s also 40% of the internet. That’s an insane number when you think about it realistically.

Given WordPress’s popularity and long history (especially for the internet), it’s easy to find an experienced WordPress developer. It’s not just about who builds your website originally or helps you make those large changes, either. Most content writers, agencies, marketing strategists, and VAs have experience working within the WordPress admin. You barely need to complete any onboarding or training when you hire someone new.

As we already discussed, AI-generated websites depend largely on who built it and how. Your agency may not even give you access to make regular updates.

One reason I’ve recommended WordPress for years? It’s simple to scale. I have clients who start with a single-page website (on WordPress) and grow it into a robust, full-service site. You can add only the features you need without paying for a bunch of things you’ll never use. These have been tested for years, and WordPress and plugin authors routinely patch security issues.

Theoretically, AI-generated websites should also work like this. However, more advanced features like eCommerce or user portals require securely written code. Unfortunately, about 45% of AI-generated code contains basic security flaws, meaning your customers’ private data is at risk.

One of the best things about WordPress is its decades-old ecosystem. This includes thousands of developers who build WordPress plugins, themes, and custom sites. WordPress developers often network online, leaning on shared experience to help solve complex problems.

Because WordPress is open source, it can exist even if the parent company goes out of business. Your host has all the files you’ll need to keep your website running smoothly for potentially years.

AI-generated code has the same problems that Squarespace and Wix did when they launched: they’re new. It’s difficult for me to recommend that any real company put their cornerstone marketing piece in the hands of a brand-new company or system. While AI-generated websites can exist without connections to tools like Claude Code, we still haven’t figured out all the downsides of these systems.

I don’t do risk when it comes to my client’s marketing foundations, and you shouldn’t either.

Is there anyone who could benefit from an AI-generated website? Unless you are just trying to spin up a temporary minimum viable product, no. You should choose reliable, secure, SEO-friendly performance over speed every single day.

You don’t have to use WordPress, but it’s still very much alive in 2027 and will be for years. If you have been leaning towards AI because your website feels slow, hard to edit, or confusing, it’s time to find the right WordPress partner.

Want to know what building an accessible, SEO-friendly, fast WordPress website looks like? Schedule a free call. We’ll walk you through the realities and show you what’s possible.