There is indeed not always a need for WordPress. I have been using ProcessWire (1) for over a decade. Open-source, zero dependencies, no-nonsense CMS — and when it comes time to build a new website, I go back to it even in 2026, because you make it once and it works for 10 years and counting.
Cloudflare is just jealous that most of their customers are actually running WordPress, but this is not something they will be able to solve with AI hype.
+1 for Processwire! I’ve mentioned it here a few times over the years and nobody seems to have ever heard of it! I’ve got a few sites well past 10 years now still happily chugging away on it! Basically zero issues with it, ever. It’s still my go to for all sorts of projects - installs in a few seconds, loads of really useful functionality out the box, easy API, beautifully flexible for all sorts of projects and a great community and ecosystem around it as well!
I expect the bigger risk to dynamic database-backed CMS platforms right now is that AI assistance makes static site generator tools run against a version controlled repository of content less intimidating for most users... and static sites are cheaper to run (especially in this era of badly coded scrapers flooding the internet) and much less likely to fall vulnerable to security problems.
I expect we'll see a further wave of CMS interfaces which provide a nicer editing experience on top of flat files stored in Git.
Maybe the strategic move for platforms like WordPress (and maybe Django too! The Django admin remains a very popular CMS platform) is to invest more in separation of admin editing from serving, such that there's an obvious path to edit your content in the CMS but deploy it as static files.
My own blog uses the Django admin and serves the site via Django (albeit behind a 15m Cloudflare cache to handle traffic spikes) but I have a scheduled GitHub Action that backs up the content to a Git repository: https://github.com/simonw/simonwillisonblog-backup - it's not much of a stretch from that to having the Git repository feed content to a static site generator.
There's Tina CMS for editing files in Git, but honestly editing flat files is probably the least interesting or complicated part of an enterprise CMS, and IMO there's rarely a good reason to interact with files directly versus a database that publishes files.
Depends on the company level, on my line of business, what companies care about are headless CMS, with AI workflows, and oriented towards MACH.
Ah, and all of them have partnerships with Vercel, and possibly Netlify.
Sitecore, Contentful, Sanity, Storybrook,...
If anything, they killed the need for backend skills, you get a ready made SaaS, program interactions with AI, and if anything requires backend like logic, it is taken care by Vercel or Netlify functions.
I never really understood the argument, you can design the frontend with AI anyway and then use WordPress as the CMS for clients. Clients want to be able to log in, update CPTs, edit a calendar, post pictures, things like that. Surely the idea isn't to vibe-code an admin panel/cms from scratch for every project?
For client projects I tend to go with KirbyCMS. Easy license, great functionality, very easy to setup and configure for the client side users. And way less bloated. I actually really dig it and nearly exclusively use it for my projects.
But other tools are great as well, like ProcessWire (named above).
I’m not sure that I buy all the points made. I can imagine an AI centric CMS where the technical interface (implement this site on MySQL, host it there, use Next.js, etc) is distinct from the content interface (change store hours) or even the design (change the background).
I have used Wordpress a lot (too much) and came to the view that for most websites it is just overkill. So I built https://harcstack.org and vowed to write all my new sites in actual code.
HTMX to the rescue since you can write server side code in a sensible way and still have quite a dymanic UX.
But it needs a better headless capability. Most separate front ends appear to be grafted on relying on plugins. Which doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.
> Joost de Valk, founder of Yoast SEO, wrote about how he migrated his personal blog from WordPress to Astro, the hottest new JavaScript framework in town, and suggested the blasphemous idea that not all sites need a CMS (he’s since migrated again to EmDash, which I talk about later)
That's a weird thing to read. (Not criticism for the author or the article)
> Migrated his personal blog
Is that a thing worth mentioning? I did that over a decade ago.
> Astro, the hottest new JavaScript framework in town
I thought it's 2026 now, not early 2010s. People still do that?
> the blasphemous idea that not all sites need a CMS
The same way coding agents don’t replace the need for an IDE, content generation needs to support arbitrary human-to-agent handoffs, where the human can say “this is the wrong direction, I sketched this change of what I want it to look like, see how it’s different and apply that pattern.”
And, in the broadest sense, that human interface is a CMS; the agent is just another editor, albeit one that happens to read and write raw data rather than using a WYSIWIG (or similar) editor.
Cloudflare is just jealous that most of their customers are actually running WordPress, but this is not something they will be able to solve with AI hype.
1. https://github.com/processwire/processwire
Great system as far as I am concerned - even if I tend to use KirbyCMS for most of my projects.
I expect we'll see a further wave of CMS interfaces which provide a nicer editing experience on top of flat files stored in Git.
Maybe the strategic move for platforms like WordPress (and maybe Django too! The Django admin remains a very popular CMS platform) is to invest more in separation of admin editing from serving, such that there's an obvious path to edit your content in the CMS but deploy it as static files.
My own blog uses the Django admin and serves the site via Django (albeit behind a 15m Cloudflare cache to handle traffic spikes) but I have a scheduled GitHub Action that backs up the content to a Git repository: https://github.com/simonw/simonwillisonblog-backup - it's not much of a stretch from that to having the Git repository feed content to a static site generator.
Ah, and all of them have partnerships with Vercel, and possibly Netlify.
Sitecore, Contentful, Sanity, Storybrook,...
If anything, they killed the need for backend skills, you get a ready made SaaS, program interactions with AI, and if anything requires backend like logic, it is taken care by Vercel or Netlify functions.
But other tools are great as well, like ProcessWire (named above).
I have used Wordpress a lot (too much) and came to the view that for most websites it is just overkill. So I built https://harcstack.org and vowed to write all my new sites in actual code.
HTMX to the rescue since you can write server side code in a sensible way and still have quite a dymanic UX.
But it needs a better headless capability. Most separate front ends appear to be grafted on relying on plugins. Which doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.
That's a weird thing to read. (Not criticism for the author or the article)
> Migrated his personal blog
Is that a thing worth mentioning? I did that over a decade ago.
> Astro, the hottest new JavaScript framework in town
I thought it's 2026 now, not early 2010s. People still do that?
> the blasphemous idea that not all sites need a CMS
Is it? People still haven't accepted this?
>wrote about how he migrated his personal blog from WordPress to Astro
>he’s since migrated again to EmDash
Do you need to know anything more about this guy? If that's one of the articles sources, I think you can ignore anything it says.
And, in the broadest sense, that human interface is a CMS; the agent is just another editor, albeit one that happens to read and write raw data rather than using a WYSIWIG (or similar) editor.
Depending on who you talk to, they may not agree. (I am not in this camp but I am certainly aware of people who are.)
Nice turn of a phrase! I was surprised it was a GoogleNope except for you, op.