A response to The Evolution of the World’s Most Popular CMS (July 2024)
In July 2024 I told the story of how WordPress grew from a simple blogging tool into the platform most of the web runs on. Pages arrived in 2005. Custom post types in 2010. WooCommerce and Advanced Custom Fields in 2011. And then, in 2018, page builders like Elementor learned how to design whole themes, not just page content.
I called that last step the game changer, and I meant it. Here is the problem it solved:
“And again, until 2018 the only way to modify these theme parts was to write PHP, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.”
That was true. If you wanted a custom header, a custom archive layout, or a template that displayed your own content types, you needed a programmer. Programmers were expensive and hard to schedule. Page builders took them out of the loop, and that saved our clients real money.
The planet and its moon
I had a bit of fun with an analogy in that video:
“If WordPress is the biggest planet in the CMS solar system, Elementor is its largest moon.”
I went on to describe the satellites orbiting that moon, the add-ons built for Elementor itself. At the time I saw that whole system as a strength. A huge open ecosystem meant someone had already built almost anything you might need, and you could plug it in without writing code.
Looking back, I can see the other side of that picture more clearly. Every satellite is another layer. A WordPress site built that way runs WordPress, plus a page builder, plus the builder’s pro add-on, plus third party add-ons for the builder, plus the plugins that integrate with all of it. Each layer loads its own code and gets its own updates. Each one is a place where something can break. We accepted that weight because the alternative, paying programmers to write theme templates by hand, cost so much more.
What 2018 solved, and what solves it now
The key sentence in that video was this one:
“And all these tools can be deployed without reliance on expensive and hard to access programmers.”
That was the whole point of the page builder era. The bottleneck was programmer time, so we routed around it.
The bottleneck has moved. AI agents now write and revise custom PHP, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript under experienced direction, quickly and at a small fraction of what that work used to cost. The theme parts I said could only be modified by writing code? Writing that code is no longer the expensive part. So we don’t need a heavy builder standing between WordPress and the design anymore.
That is why we now build on our own AI-native theme. The headers, footers, templates, and archive layouts are custom code, written to fit that one site. There is no builder layer, and no moon full of satellites orbiting it.
We no longer have to choose between custom templates and an affordable budget. We get both, plus a leaner site.
WordPress stays
I want to be clear about one thing. None of this is a move away from WordPress. The history I told in 2024 is still the reason we build on it. Custom post types, custom fields, a mature editing experience, a massive community, and a content management foundation that has been refined for more than twenty years. All of that still matters.
What changes is how we put the front end together. The content model is still WordPress. Your team still logs into WordPress, still edits posts and pages, still manages media the way they always have. For clients who liked editing directly on the page, we include Simply Edit, our on-page editor, which works on the custom code.
The evolution continues
When I made that video I described a platform that kept evolving, from blog to CMS to fully visual theme building. I thought of the page builder as the destination. It turned out to be another stage.
What hasn’t changed is that someone still has to decide what the site should be. Planning the content structure, designing the experience, and reviewing every template to make sure it works the way it should. That is human work, and it is the work my team does. The agents follow our playbook and design standards. We direct them and stand behind the result.
WordPress made the low code revolution possible. It is just as good a foundation for the next one.
¡Viva la Revolución!