Each year, the report State of Enterprise WordPress offers a valuable insight into the use of WordPress in businesses. Published in January, he questions more than 100 digital professionals (DSI, CTO, platform managers) to draw up an overview of WordPress's place in large-scale digital strategies.
This year's report confirms what we observe every day at Be API: WordPress anchors sustainably in business environments.
But beyond the numbers, what should be remembered when driving a digital platform? What do these trends say about changing needs, technical constraints, budgetary choices?
We decrypt some strong signals from the report, enriched by our field reading — the projects and clients we accompany on a daily basis.
Analysis of the major WordPress 2025 trends: What the numbers reveal (and what they hide)
Trend 1: More and more companies use WordPress only (+17%)
A sharp increase: 49% of respondents say today only use WordPress for their main platform, compared to 32% last year.
👉 What this reveals:
Companies tend to centralize their tools, simplify their technical stacks, and reduce maintenance costs. In a more limited budgetary context, rationalizing its ecosystem becomes a strategic lever. The #1 reason invoked to choose WordPress is... the richness of its features. An interesting result, because it contradicts the image often associated with WordPress as CMS « Simple ». Actually, it's the ecosystem. — extensions, themes, integrations — which makes it an extremely powerful solution, when it is controlled.
👉 What it's asking:
Some of the barriers expressed by companies, such as perceived limits in multilingual or multi-site, seem less to reflect the actual WordPress capabilities than past experiences or a lack of accompaniment.
WordPress is not a "simple" CMS, it is a powerful ecosystem — if you can control it.
🔍 Side multilingual, the WordPress ecosystem today offers several mature solutions (Polylang, Weglot...), capable of managing localized content in dozens of languages, with a fine consideration of editorial specificities.
🔁 Side multisite, again, WordPress natively has a very powerful multisite mode, which we use at the agency for complex devices – especially in the banking sector, for brands with international deployment, or even public institutions. The whole is based on a work of architecture upstream, coupled with a strategic accompaniment: definition of governance rules, mutualization of assets, process of local deployment, etc...
In short: the solution is adapted, but requires a clear vision, a rigorous structuring, and an experienced technical partner to take full advantage of it.
Trend 2: Back from headless (28% → 16%): simple trend or real turn?
The share of companies using WordPress in headless drops from 28% to 16%.
🔍 Reminder: What is "headless"?
In headless architecture, the CMS (WordPress here) is used only to manage content, without directly producing pages visible to the user. The front-end (the visible layer of the site) is completely decoupled, often built with JavaScript frameworks like React, Vue or Next.js, which come to consume content via APIs.
This approach allows for great flexibility in the design of interfaces, better scalability, and centralization of content to power multiple media (site, mobile app, terminal...). It is very suitable for multi-channel or high performance environments (such as press groups that broadcast their content on the web, mobile and partner apps, large e-commercers who want an ultra-fast and customizable front, or tech startups that integrate their CMS into a wider application system.)
👉 Our reading:
In theory, headless promises flexibility and scalability. In practice, this approach involves a high technical complexity – multiplication of software bricks, deployment, maintenance, monitoring – which involves more resources, specific skills in modern JS, and often higher implementation and operating costs.
👉 Our conviction:
The choice of architecture must be driven by business needs, not by the fashion effect. For many business projects — editorials, corporate — A classic WordPress architecture well designed with Gutenberg allows to meet 90% of the goals with a fast time-to-market, greater autonomy of the business teams, budget control, and simplified maintenance.
The headless, for its part, remains relevant in well-identified cases: high volumetricity, ultra-personalised user experience, platform or microservices logic, etc.
At Be API, we do not oppose approaches, rather we help our customers choose the architecture best suited to their business objectives, their internal constraints and their digital maturity. The right choice is not the most innovative: it is the one that creates the most lasting value.
Trend 3: Companies invest more in WordPress... but otherwise
More and more companies are recruiting internal teams to operate their WordPress. On the agency side, budgets are more modest than in 2023.
👉 What it translates:
Less gross production, more strategic advice, training and support over time. It is also a real change of position: companies no longer look for performers, but for partners able to bring real added value, be a force for proposals and secure technical and functional choices over time.
At Be API, this is a trend that we have seen for a long time and to which we adapt our methodologies as we move forward.
There is a need to develop more flexible forms of accompaniment, able to respond to large-scale projects (complex multisites, large-scale technical overhauls), as well as to more agile projects where an internal team is supported, with a high level of expertise.
Companies no longer seek performers but partners. Less gross production, more strategic advice.
👉 In this sense, the decline in large budgets is not bad news: it is an opportunity to clarify our position, to better qualify projects, and to create models of collaboration that are more aligned with business expectations.
Go further... the other issues of WordPress in 2025
Security: the dead corner of trends
Little discussed in the report, however, safety remains one of the major obstacles to the adoption of WordPress in company. For ISDs and security teams, CMS still sometimes suffers from an unreassuring image — often linked to risky implementations or lack of control of good practices.
👉 Yet, coupled with expert support, WordPress can perfectly meet security requirements, even for actors with whom security is at the very heart of the project.
At the agency, each project is designed to ensure a level of safety in line with company IS standards, including in the most sensitive contexts.
An approach based on three pillars:
- Secure architecture from design, with hard code, partitioned access, and fine management of roles and permissions.
- A preventive, corrective and progressive maintenance programme, provided by our RUN team, to ensure a high level of long-term operational security.
- A strengthened supervisory and support system, with e.g. priority updates, rigorous management of ALS, specific periodic penalty payments, or a dedicated direct line at high-exposure events.
Our conviction: WordPress is a reliable solution for companies, provided they are accompanied with rigour, transparency and demand.
WordPress governance: a topical topic
Against the background of the report, a sensitive subject currently animates the WordPress community: the conflict between two major players in the ecosystem, Automattic (the parent company of WordPress.com) and WP Engine (specialised WordPress host), around the management and monetization of extensions.
👉 What to remember:
It is primarily a commercial conflict, linked to disagreements on the distribution strategy of plugins. A disagreement that made noise, because it affects historical figures of the project. But this does not challenge the quality of WordPress as a solution, nor the reliability of its technical base.
But this kind of controversy can raise legitimate issues for businesses: who really governs WordPress? Can we make sustainable choices in this ecosystem?
👉 The reassuring point:
WordPress is based on a broad, active and resilient community. Its development does not depend on a single actor, but on a set of contributors, agencies, publishers and experts who ensure its stability and evolution. Collective momentum remains very strong, and the proposed solutions continue to evolve in the right direction.
For companies, the challenge is to stay informed, to rely on an active watch, and to make informed and documented choices when integrating WordPress into their digital ecosystem.
IAA and WordPress: a revolution still in sleep
While the IA redesigned the web, it remains little present in the WordPress priorities of companies. An interesting paradox, but explainable.
In the majority of WordPress projects in company, content creation remains today external to CMS: texts are written, read and validated upstream, before being incorporated into WordPress. Result: IA uses in direct connection with WordPress are still marginal.
👉But the AI is there. And she's moving fast.
Supported content generation, customization, SEO optimization, administration assistants, workflow automation... The use cases multiply in the WordPress ecosystem, and the tooling progresses very quickly. The potential is very real, although it is not yet central in enterprise projects.
👉 Our conviction: stay on active watch.
Companies have every interest in following closely the evolution of IA tools in WordPress, to identify the relevant uses to be gradually integrated into their processes.
For our part, we conduct numerous continuous tests on emerging tools, AI plugins, content generators, intelligent assistants... The objective is to anticipate uses that could actually save business teams time or value.
📡 Want to follow these developments closely? We regularly share our technical watch on our platforms Mastodon and Bluesky, where our experts decipher the innovations to be monitored.
In conclusion, the report State of Enterprise WordPress 2024 highlights a structural evolution: WordPress is no longer just a popular CMS, it is now a central brick of corporate digital ecosystems.
Major trends include:
- consolidation of tools,
- seeking efficiency,
- need for autonomy,
- and governance.
WordPress remains perfectly calibrated for companies, even the most demanding — provided you have a solid strategy, well thought out architecture, and a partner able to structure, secure and evolve the platform over time.
Each company has its own specificities, internal constraints and digital maturity. That's why it's not so much about choosing the right CMS, but asking the right questions at the right time.
Are you wondering about the architecture of your WordPress platform? Are you considering a redesign, a change of approach, or simply an audit of your ecosystem?
We are available to discuss it — even without specifications, even to simply make a diagnosis or explore leads. 📩 Let's talk about it.
