Something happened this year that had never happened before: WordPress lost market share. It peaked around 43.6% in mid-2025, fell to 42.6% by March 2026, and sits near 41.9% now. Not a wobble — the first sustained decline in more than twenty years.
The reason usually given is security, and the numbers look damning. Patchstack recorded 11,334 new vulnerabilities across the WordPress ecosystem in 2025, up 42% year on year. By January 2026 they were arriving at 333 a week.
Then you read one more line of that report and the whole argument changes shape.
97% of those vulnerabilities are not in WordPress
They are in plugins and themes. WordPress core accounts for about 3%. Around 91% trace to plugins alone.
That single fact reframes the entire comparison. “Is WordPress secure?” turns out to be close to the wrong question. The real one is:
How many third-party plugins will this site run, and who is checking them?
Because a WordPress site with six well-chosen, actively maintained plugins is a very different risk from one with thirty-four, four of which were abandoned by their authors in 2023 and one of which handles your contact form.
And the pipeline is growing, not shrinking. WordPress passed 64,000 free plugins; 6,086 were added in 2025, a record, and 2026 added 4,143 in its first five months — a pace of roughly ten thousand a year. More plugins means more capability and more attack surface, in the same motion.
So what is the actual difference?
Strip away the tribalism and it comes down to one trade:
| WordPress | Webflow | |
|---|---|---|
| Who maintains the platform | You (or someone you pay) | Webflow |
| Extensibility | Effectively unlimited, via 64,000 plugins | Bounded by what Webflow supports |
| Where risk lives | Plugins and themes you chose | Webflow’s own platform |
| Cost shape | Lower floor, unpredictable ceiling | Higher floor, predictable |
| If you stop paying attention | It degrades | It mostly doesn’t |
Webflow is not more secure because it is better engineered. It is more secure because it does not let you install thirty-four plugins. That is a real advantage, and it is also the exact same sentence as its main limitation.
What it actually costs over three years
Published ranges, so you can sanity-check your own quote:
| WordPress | Webflow | |
|---|---|---|
| Platform / hosting | $5–30/mo shared, $30–100/mo managed | $14–235/mo, hosting and CDN included |
| Themes and plugins | $0–100 theme, $0–400 plugins | Included |
| Professional build | $5,000–50,000 | $3,000–15,000 |
| Three-year all-in | $8,000–40,000 | $4,500–15,000 |
WordPress usually wins on paper over two to three years — provided nothing goes wrong and somebody does the maintenance. Those two conditions are where the ranges come from. The bottom of the WordPress range is a well-run site. The top is one that was neglected and then rescued.
Webflow’s number is narrower because there is less to go wrong and less you can decide about.
Full disclosure
We maintain WordPress sites for a living. A comparison written by someone with that stake should be read with that in mind, so here is the honest version anyway:
We would rather you ran a lean WordPress site you understood than a fat one we got paid to babysit. Every plugin we can talk a client out of is revenue we do not earn and a night we do not spend fixing something at 2am. Those interests point the same way more often than you would expect from an agency.
When each one is genuinely right
Choose WordPress when content is central to the business, you need a specific integration that only exists as a plugin, you publish often, or you are running real e-commerce with unusual requirements. Also choose it when you already have it, it works, and nobody has made an actual case for moving.
Choose Webflow when the site is a brand presence rather than a content engine, you want predictable monthly costs, and — this is the honest one — nobody at your company is going to maintain anything, ever. That is not a failing. It is a completely normal situation and it should drive the decision.
Choose neither when what you actually need is a booking system, a shop or an internal tool, and the website is only the front door. We have watched people spend three months choosing a CMS for a problem that was never a CMS problem.
Do not migrate to escape maintenance
This is the mistake we see most, and it is expensive.
A migration is a real project. Content has to move, URLs have to be redirected or you lose the rankings you spent years earning, forms and integrations get rebuilt, and somebody has to test all of it. Doing that to avoid plugin updates is paying several thousand dollars to solve a problem that a maintenance plan solves for a fraction of it.
Migrating is right when the platform is genuinely blocking you: you cannot do the thing you need, or the site is so far gone that rebuilding is cheaper than repairing. It is wrong when the real problem is that nobody has logged in for two years. That problem follows you to the new platform, it just takes longer to become visible.
The uncomfortable summary
WordPress is not losing share because it got worse. It is losing share because a large number of people were running WordPress sites that nobody was maintaining, and platforms that do not require maintenance are now good enough for what those people needed.
If that describes you, Webflow is a legitimate answer and you should not feel talked out of it.
If you are running WordPress deliberately — for the content, the integrations, the ownership — then the security statistics are not really about you, as long as you can answer one question: how many plugins are on that site, and when did someone last check them?
If you cannot answer it, that is the actual finding, and it is true on any platform.
Genuinely unsure which side you are on? Send us the address and we will count the plugins, check what is out of date, and tell you plainly whether a migration is worth it. Free, and if the answer is “stay where you are and fix three things”, that is what you will get — ask us.
Sources: State of WordPress security 2026 · WordPress market share data · plugin and theme statistics · Webflow vs WordPress cost comparison