WordPress Veterans Leave the CMS: Here's Which Framework They're Migrating To
WordPress has lost its record market share: after peaking at 43.6% in mid-2025, it has fallen to 42.2% according to W3Techs, representing a decline of 1.4 percentage points which, considering the historical weight of the CMS, is significant. Gaining ground is Astro, the JavaScript framework for static sites that is currently downloaded 2.5 million times a week, double the 1.4 million in 2025.
Official WordPress statistics show that 10.56% of WordPress sites have not been updated since 2022: these are increasingly abandoned sites or spam that artificially inflate the numbers. The real share of active installations is therefore significantly below 42.2%.
Why Developers Are Choosing Astro
Astro generates static HTML pages, without databases and without PHP: the result is an average loading speed of 0.44 seconds compared to 0.81 seconds for WordPress. This translates into a 46% advantage on the LCP metric, which is also a Google ranking factor. Furthermore, 60% of Astro sites achieve a “Good” score on Core Web Vitals, compared to about 38% of WordPress sites. In the 2025 CWV ranking compiled by Search Engine Journal, WordPress ranked last among major CMSs, with only 43.44% of sites promoted, behind Drupal, Squarespace, Wix, Shopify, and Duda.
Fueling this trend are AI coding tools. Claude Code, OpenAI Codex, and similar tools have lowered the technical barrier of Astro: those who previously needed advanced JavaScript skills can now build and maintain a static site with almost no need to open an editor.
Joost de Valk, the founder of Yoast SEO, one of the most recognizable names in the WordPress ecosystem, summarized the paradigm shift in one sentence:
“For twenty years, ‘I want a site’ meant ‘I need a CMS.’ That mindset is outdated. People never wanted a CMS. They wanted a site.”
Cloudflare's Acquisition and the Community's Response
On January 16, 2026, Cloudflare acquired The Astro Technology Company, the team behind the framework, with the explicit commitment to keep it open source. Astro is already used by brands like Unilever, Visa, and NBC News. The acquisition has fueled some suspicion: Rayhan Arif, a WordPress entrepreneur, has suggested a “coordinated campaign” behind the many posts of people leaving WP for Astro, but replies in the Twitter discussion refuted this claim: the movement towards Astro was already underway long before Cloudflare came on the scene.
You’re probably wrong if you think it’s Cloudflare who's behind it. This happened way before Cloudflare acquired Astro or created EmDash – Tommy J. Vedvik (@tommyvedvik)
May 4, 2026
That said, WordPress is not standing still. Version 7.0 introduces a native AI infrastructure designed for the entire ecosystem: the Abilities API (already in WordPress 6.9) allows plugins and themes to register their functionalities in a format readable by AI systems; the MCP Adapter translates these capabilities into Anthropic's Model Context Protocol; the new WP AI Client offers a provider-agnostic layer to call AI models directly from the core. The idea is that the huge ecosystem of plugins and themes in WordPress can become the ground on which to build AI features that no other CMS will match in breadth.
The game is not yet over. Astro is growing rapidly and has the wind at its back, but it covers a specific niche: predominantly static sites, technical teams, code-first workflows. WordPress 7.0, with its AI infrastructure, aims to remain the default choice for editorial teams, e-commerce, and anyone who needs large-scale non-technical editing. The real structural change is that for the first time in twenty years, the answer to the question “how do I build a site?” is no longer automatically “I install WordPress.”