(Or: What If It Could Be Something Even Bigger?)
Loveable is now valued at $1.8 billion, with $100 million in annual recurring revenue. That’s not a typo. A tool that lets people build and deploy full web apps with AI just passed a milestone that many of us in the WordPress ecosystem would have laughed at even 8 months ago. But things have changed.
And the truth is, we can all feel it. The WordPress market has been cooling for years. Growth in “just building websites” has plateaued. It's not a collapse. But it's no longer a rocket ship either.
You see it in plugin sales. You feel it at WordCamps. You notice it in the quieter theme forums, the shrinking Facebook groups, and the flatter charts.
It’s a sobering shift, but also a potentially liberating one.
The World Is Moving On, And Fast
We’re now in an era where tools like Bolt, Loveable, Replit, Windsurf, and Cursor are redefining what it means to “build for the web.” They let users go from idea to product in minutes, not weeks, and they do it with a mix of AI, speed, and abstraction that feels downright magical.
These platforms are built on a different assumption: that the web is not just about websites anymore. It’s about software. About apps. About interactivity, personalisation, and automation. I wrote about this shift earlier this year in The Web is About to be Appified, and it’s already playing out faster than I expected.
Meanwhile, WordPress is still largely viewed, internally and externally, as a website builder. Even in 2025.
What Is WordPress, Really?
In my earlier piece, What is WordPress? A Technology Stack or a Mission?, I asked whether our allegiance to the stack (PHP, MySQL, REST, etc.) is holding us back from fulfilling a broader mission.
If WordPress was always meant to “democratize publishing,” what if it now needs to democratize building for the web?
That means moving beyond just websites.
Beyond just themes and plugins.
Beyond our current stack.
Imagine if you could build anything with WordPress — not just blogs or stores, but full apps, SaaS platforms, custom tools, internal software, interactive data dashboards, you name it.
Imagine a future where WordPress becomes an open-source, community-driven version of Loveable but with more transparency, control, and portability. The kind of tool you could inspect, fork, self-host, or contribute to. Not a black box, but a platform you could shape.
The Black Box Problem (And The WordPress Opportunity)
Today’s new generation of AI-powered tools are stunning, but they are also largely opaque. As powerful as they are, they’re mostly proprietary. They decide how your project is structured, where it's hosted, and what it integrates with.
This leaves a huge open space and WordPress is perfectly positioned to fill it.
Why?
- WordPress has brand
- It has distribution — powering over 40% of the web
- And it has a developer community that’s already used to building and extending things
If we were to evolve the mission — to not just democratize publishing, but democratize building for the web — we’d be stepping into a future that desperately needs an open alternative to the closed AI builders currently dominating the landscape.
A Massive Strategic Shift, But a Necessary One
Of course, this would be a huge shift. It wouldn’t just be about adding AI to the dashboard or bolting on some fancy code generation.
It would require us to rethink:
- How we define the WordPress “experience”
- How tightly we cling to the current tech stack
- Whether we’re willing to compete (not just integrate) with new AI-native tools
In The 3 Great Headwinds Facing WordPress, I wrote about the structural pressures threatening our ecosystem: AI, platform risk, and an ageing stack.
Each of these pressures points to the same conclusion:
We can’t keep doing what we’ve always done.
A Glimmer of That Future
At WordCamp Asia, Matías Ventura gave a talk that scratched the surface of this possibility. His vision for what the block editor could become felt like the seeds of a platform — not just a page builder. A system for composing not just layouts, but logic. Flows. Behaviour.
That’s the WordPress I want to see in 5 years.
Not just “WordPress, the CMS” but WordPress, the open platform for building anything on the web.
Final Thought
So, can WordPress still be WordPress?
Maybe not the WordPress we’ve known.
But maybe it can be something bigger, and even more important.
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