"Is WordPress Dying?" — A Caustic Review Of The Nicest Video On YouTube

Ferdy Korpershoek has spent over a decade teaching people WordPress on YouTube, mostly by way of enormous, patient, four-hour tutorials that have genuinely helped a lot of people build a living. He has now published an eight-minute video titled 'Is WordPress Dying? Here's What's Actually Happening,' and his answer is: no, it isn't, it's changing, be open-minded, adapt, your skills transfer, God bless you.

It is a kind video. It is a decent video. It is also, in places, a video that quietly avoids the question it put in the title. So let us do the thing nobody in the WordPress community does to each other in public: take it apart line by line and see what's load-bearing.

Let's start with what he gets right, because it's not nothing

Three arguments in that video are correct and should be tattooed on the inside of every freelancer's eyelids.

1. Your skill was never WordPress

This is the strongest thing he says and he says it repeatedly: don't get attached to a tool, get attached to solving the problem. Correct. Absolutely correct. The person who can extract a coherent brief out of a client who 'just wants something modern,' scope it, price it, ship it, and then handle the phone call three weeks later when the client's cousin says the logo is too small — that person is employable in any stack, forever. The person whose entire identity is knowing where Elementor hides its container padding settings is employable until the next version ships.

He backs it with his own history: HTML, then Dreamweaver, then Joomla, then WordPress, then Elementor, now AI tooling. That is a man who has already survived four extinction events. He's earned the right to say it.

2. If WordPress 'pulled the plug' tomorrow, your site would not vanish

Also correct, and worth saying because a surprising number of people don't understand what self-hosted means. Your files are on your server, your database is your database, nobody can remote-kill it. The failure mode is slow: no core updates, plugins rot, PHP versions move on, compatibility frays, and eventually your site becomes a security liability rather than a business asset.

Where we part company is the framing. He presents this as reassurance. It isn't. 'Nothing breaks immediately, it just becomes progressively more dangerous to leave running' is the exact description of an unmaintained WordPress site right now, today, with the project very much alive. Millions of them are already in that state. The comfort blanket he's offering is a description of the current problem.

3. Adapt or die, illustrated with actual scar tissue

The best moment in the video is when he stops talking about WordPress and talks about himself. His long-form tutorials were pulling hundreds of thousands of views. Views dropped. His response was to double down — make an even longer, even better tutorial. Almost nobody watched it. His conclusion: sometimes trying harder is the wrong move and adjusting is the right one.

That is a genuinely honest thing to admit on camera and it is the single most useful sixty seconds in the video. It is also, and he does not appear to notice this, the most damning data point he presents. Sit with it for a second.

“The market stopped wanting to spend four hours learning WordPress. That is not a YouTube algorithm story. That is a demand story.”

Now the parts that don't survive contact with reality

The 43.5% number is doing far too much work

He leans on it hard: 43.5% of all websites, millions of users, thousands of plugins, enormous ecosystem, technology doesn't always win by being best, it wins by already being everywhere. Instagram, Apple, Windows, Snapchat get name-checked as proof that incumbency is a moat.

Two problems. First, a market-share percentage is a stock, not a flow. It tells you what happened over twenty years. It tells you nothing about what is being built this quarter. The number that matters is the share of new sites launched, by people under thirty-five, who had a choice. Nobody in the WordPress community quotes that number, and it is not because it's flattering.

Second, the number itself has been drifting downward, slowly, for a while now — and 'slowly' is exactly how these things look right up until they don't. Ask Nokia. Ask Blackberry. Ask, in fact, Snapchat, which he cites as an example of incumbency winning, and which has spent years as a case study in what happens when a bigger platform copies your one good feature. Choosing Snapchat as your example of unassailable market position is an unforced error.

'AI and WordPress are partners, not competitors' is a workflow, not a strategy

His concrete example: get Claude to design a nice site, port it into WordPress via a migration tool, tidy the design in Elementor, then bolt on Yoast or Rank Math and WooCommerce for the functionality. Best of both worlds.

Let's count the moving parts in 'best of both worlds.' An AI tool. A conversion tool. A page builder. An SEO plugin. A commerce plugin. Five vendors, five update cycles, five billing relationships, five things that can break each other on a Tuesday. He has described the WordPress problem and presented it as the WordPress solution. That is not partnership. That is the ecosystem doing what it always does: absorbing a new technology by wrapping four plugins around it and charging you rent for the privilege.

And note what got quietly dropped from the sentence. The reason people are excited about AI-built sites is speed, cost, and not having to maintain a plugin stack. His workflow reintroduces the plugin stack in step three and calls it a win.

'If WordPress dies, someone will build a migration business' — sure, but that's not the reassurance he thinks it is

He spends a good chunk of the video imagining the aftermath: if WordPress became irrelevant, entrepreneurs would build billion-dollar tools to migrate all those sites elsewhere, agencies would sell it as a service, everyone would be fine. Which is true and also completely beside the point he's making.

He is arguing 'don't worry, WordPress isn't dying' and then arguing 'and if it is, there's money in the funeral.' Those are two different videos. The second one is more interesting and considerably less comfortable, which is presumably why it got four minutes instead of forty.

Also: migrating a WordPress site is not a migration problem, it's an archaeology problem. Content moves fine. What doesn't move is fourteen years of plugin-specific custom fields, a theme with business logic welded into functions.php, shortcodes embedded in post content, and a redirect map maintained by somebody who left in 2019. The 'seamless transfer' business he's imagining exists already, in miniature, and everyone who has ever used it will tell you the same thing: it gets you 80% there and the last 20% costs more than the first 80%.

The thing the video carefully does not mention

Eight minutes on the health of WordPress and not one word about governance. Not one word about the last two years of legal proceedings, the community fracture, the forks, the contributor exodus, the maintainers who walked, the sponsors who went quiet. Not one word about the fact that the project's direction is set by a structure most of its ecosystem has no say in.

Not one word, either, about security. In the same month this video went out, WordPress Core shipped a fix for a pre-authentication remote code execution chain so severe the project overrode administrators' own auto-update settings to force the patch out. That is the actual answer to 'what's actually happening.' It didn't come up.

Nor did the economics. 'Thousands of plugins' sounds like abundance until you notice how many of the important ones now sit inside private-equity portfolios, with the pricing behaviour that implies. The ecosystem he describes as WordPress's great strength is also the mechanism by which your costs and your risk both go up every year without you agreeing to anything.

This is the polite omission that defines almost all WordPress commentary from inside the WordPress economy. Nobody is lying. People just decline to mention the bits that would upset the people who pay them. Which, to be fair, is not a WordPress problem. It's a YouTube problem.

The honest version of his argument

Strip out the reassurance and there's a solid thesis in there. It goes like this:

• →WordPress is not dying. It is being demoted — from the default choice to one option among several, which for a platform built on being the default is a much bigger deal than it sounds.
• →43.5% is a legacy number. It describes the past. Watch new-build share instead, and watch what agencies are quoting for, not what they're maintaining.
• →The maintenance base is enormous and it is not going anywhere for a decade. There is real, boring, durable money in that. It is just not growth money.
• →AI has not replaced WordPress. It has replaced the reason most small businesses ever needed WordPress, which was 'I need a brochure site and a way to edit it.' That was always the bulk of the market.
• →The skills genuinely do transfer — but only the client-facing, judgement-based ones. The tool-specific ones don't. Be honest with yourself about which category most of your day sits in.

That version is less soothing and considerably more useful. It also happens to be roughly what he says between the reassuring bits, which is why the video is worth watching rather than worth ignoring.

Verdict

He gets the philosophy right and the diagnosis wrong. 'Don't marry a tool, marry the problem' is the correct advice and he delivers it with the credibility of someone who has personally changed stacks four times. But he then answers the question in his own title by pointing at a twenty-year-old market-share statistic, proposing a five-vendor Rube Goldberg workflow as the AI response, and skipping every uncomfortable structural fact about the project's actual state in 2026.

The most telling thing in the whole video is the confession about his own channel. Demand for four-hour WordPress tutorials collapsed. He adapted, and it worked, and he is doing fine. He is living proof of his own advice — while arguing that the thing he adapted away from is in perfect health.

“He is right that you'll be fine. He is wrong about why. You'll be fine because you can leave — not because there's no reason to.”

Watch it. He's one of the good ones, and he's earned the airtime. Just don't mistake reassurance for analysis, and don't let anyone — including us — tell you what the market is doing when you can go and look at what your last five clients actually asked for.