Is anyone still using WordPress? Yes, most people

Worth answering with a number rather than an opinion. W3Techs measures WordPress at 40.3% of all websites, which is a 58.8% share of sites using a CMS at all. The next largest is Shopify at 5.4%, then Wix at 4.2% and Squarespace at 2.4%.

So the premise behind “is WordPress outdated” is wrong in the only way that can be measured. It is used more than every alternative combined, several times over.

What is fair is that WordPress asks more of you than it used to. A modern site is the core plus fifteen to thirty plugins, each an independent project with its own release schedule, its own security record and its own idea of how your data should be stored. Nothing breaks until a plugin update meets a PHP version bump on a Friday afternoon.

That maintenance burden, not the software, is what the tools below actually remove.

WordPress alternatives compared

Cheapest paid tier and what the free tier really allows, checked against each vendor’s own page on 14 September 2026.

Work out which WordPress problem you have

There are three, and they lead to different places.

“Plugins keep breaking and I keep patching.” You want fewer moving parts. Craft CMS or Statamic give you a real CMS with a small, curated add-on ecosystem. Astro removes the server-side stack entirely, so there is nothing to patch.

“The editor fights me.” This is a Gutenberg complaint, and it has a cheap answer before a migration: the Classic Editor plugin still works. If you have already tried that and still dislike it, Craft and Statamic have the best editing experiences here by a clear margin.

“My content is genuinely complex.” Multilingual, granular permissions, many related content types. This is the case where WordPress custom fields get twisted into a shape they were not designed for. Drupal was built for it, and Payload handles it well if your team writes code.

If your answer is “hosting is slow and expensive”, that is a hosting problem rather than a CMS problem, and moving to a better host is much cheaper than a migration.

What you give up, honestly

Three things, and the first is the one people underestimate.

The plugin ecosystem. Around sixty thousand plugins means that whatever niche thing you need, someone has built it. On Craft, Statamic or Payload, the equivalent is often a small custom build. That is a real cost, though it is also why those sites break less.

Hiring and handover. You can find a WordPress developer in any town at any budget. Craft and Drupal developers cost more; Payload developers are Next.js developers who will learn it. If a client will maintain the site after you, this matters more than any feature.

WooCommerce. If you sell products, WordPress plus WooCommerce is a genuinely strong, genuinely free option, and none of the alternatives here match it without going headless or moving to Shopify.

Migrating content out

The export is easier than people expect and the rest is harder.

WordPress exports posts, pages, categories, tags and comments as a WXR file, and every tool here can import it or convert it to Markdown. Media files come across as references, so you copy the uploads directory separately.

What does not transfer: page builder layouts, which are stored as shortcodes or block markup and become unreadable elsewhere; custom field configurations; form definitions; redirects; and anything a plugin stored in its own tables. If your site was built in Elementor or Divi, expect to rebuild every page’s layout by hand. That is usually the largest single line in a migration quote.

Before you switch, export your URL list and map every one to its new address. Search traffic is the asset you are actually risking.

How we test and price these tools

Every price here was read from the vendor’s own pricing page in a browser on 14 September 2026, not copied from another round-up. Market share figures come from W3Techs rather than from vendor marketing.

For content management systems we weigh three things above features: how much ongoing maintenance the stack demands, how easy it is to hire for, and what a content export actually produces. We also state whether a licence is per project or per site, since that decides the cost for an agency rather than an individual.

We read current Reddit threads for each tool, so the views here are from this year. No vendor pays for a place on this list.