WordPress powers 43% of the internet. Not 43% of small business websites, or 43% of blogs. 43% of all websites, everywhere, built by people with every level of technical ability and every size of budget.
That is not an accident.
Numbers like that don’t happen because a tool is the easiest or the simplest option. They happen because a tool keeps working as circumstances change. WordPress has been doing that since 2003, and it has not lost ground despite being challenged by shinier, simpler alternatives every couple of years.
The question worth asking is not “why is WordPress so popular?” The question is: what do people who choose WordPress understand about websites that everyone else is still figuring out?
The answer, in most cases, is ownership.
Why WordPress Holds 43% of the Web
There is a pattern I’ve noticed over the years. Business owners who come to me frustrated with their existing website very rarely built it on WordPress. They built it on a platform that made starting easy, and growing harder.
WordPress earned its market share the slow way: by being useful across a genuinely wide range of needs, by being extensible when those needs changed, and by giving users control over what they had built.
That last part is the one that tends to matter most once a business reaches a certain size.
The Difference Between Owning a Website and Renting One
There are two ways to have a website. You can own it, or you can rent it.
When you build on WordPress, you own the infrastructure. The files sit on a server you control. The database is yours. The content belongs to you. If you decide to move hosts, you take everything with you. If your developer disappears, someone else can pick up where they left off. Nothing is locked behind a system you can’t access.
When you build on a SaaS (Software as a Service) platform, whether it’s Squarespace, Wix, Webflow, Shopify, or any number of others, you are renting space inside someone else’s ecosystem. The files live on their servers. The code runs in their environment. You are, in a practical sense, a tenant.
Tenancy works when the landlord is stable, the lease terms don’t change, and the rent stays predictable. Those conditions don’t always hold.
Where I most often see “tenancy” websites spiral out of control is when the business grows and wants to add new functionality to their website. Your website provider may have offered you a great starter package, but now you need a booking module. Or e-commerce. Or a membership portal. And suddenly you find that every additional function comes with an additional monthly price tag. Suddenly that package isn’t so cost-effective. And if you want to move? Too bad. You’re going to have to start from scratch somewhere else.
The Costs That Show Up in Year Three
Nobody reads the renewal terms when they’re excited about getting a new website.
This is understandable. You’re focused on the design, the copy, the launch. The pricing page said something manageable, you agreed to it, and you moved on. A year or two later, the pricing changed. Or the features you were relying on moved to a higher tier. Or the platform was acquired and the new owner had different ideas about what to charge.
Research from 2026 found that 63% of business owners underestimate their software renewal costs by year three. That’s a striking figure, and it isn’t because business owners are careless. It’s because the real costs of a SaaS platform don’t reveal themselves immediately.
Some builder plans charge transaction fees of up to 2% on every sale. That adds up fast once your e-commerce business gets going. Functionality that WordPress handles with free or low-cost tools often requires paid apps from a builder’s marketplace. And when your site outgrows what the base plan allows, there’s usually a tier upgrade waiting.
None of these costs are exactly hidden. They’re just easy to overlook when you’re comparing a builder’s monthly fee to the upfront cost of a professionally built WordPress site.
WordPress has its own costs: hosting, maintenance, the occasional plugin license. But they’re predictable. And they don’t change because a company decided to restructure its pricing model.
Why Flexibility Matters More as Your Business Grows
A website that works perfectly for a business at launch might not work for that same business three years later.
You add a service. You pivot your offer. You start selling products. You need a booking system, or a membership area, or integrations with your CRM, your email platform, your accounting software. You hire someone to help with content. You want to change developers without rebuilding from scratch.
On WordPress, all of this is manageable. The platform has been extended by thousands of developers over more than twenty years. There is almost no functionality you cannot add. And because the files are yours, any competent WordPress developer can step in and work on the site regardless of who built it originally.
On many SaaS builders, you are limited to what the platform has chosen to support. Manual edits can break the platform’s own automation. Larger functionality needs often can’t be met at all. And if you decide to move, you’re usually starting from zero because your content doesn’t export cleanly to anywhere else.
The smaller and simpler your website, the less this matters. The moment your business starts to grow in ways you didn’t anticipate at launch, it matters considerably.
Your Website Is a Business Asset. Treat It Like One.
I’m not arguing that SaaS builders are always the wrong choice. For very simple sites with very simple needs, they can be a reasonable starting point.
But I talk to business owners regularly who built their first website on a builder, got their business off the ground, and then found themselves stuck. Not because the builder was bad, exactly. Because the builder stopped being enough, and getting out was harder than getting in.
The business owners I’ve seen navigate growth most smoothly are the ones who treated their website the way they treated their other business assets: as something worth owning properly from the start.
A lease is not the same as a title deed.
Monthly rent is not the same as equity.
43% of the web understands this. That’s not a coincidence.
