AI agents can now write a complete website in code. So do we still need WordPress? That is a question more and more WordPress people are asking themselves, and Rino de Boer is one of them.

He quit Elementor, built Pencil for the new agentic workflows, and is openly wondering whether WordPress is still the right choice. And he might not be the only one. So he sat down with Jamie Marsland. Jamie works at Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com. You can guess which side he is on and which direction the conversation went.

Let me show you mine

Rino introduced the question and showed the beta version of a plugin that illustrates where he thinks WordPress should move towards. After hearing Rino out, Jamie more or less said: let me show you my version of that… and then showed what seemed to be his version of the same plugin. Kind of rude, I guess, because Rino was mainly interested in Jamie’s view on the future of WordPress. He could have just said: I think you are on the right path. And even worse: Jamie failed to add any new insight while doing so.

Three things at once

What really struck me is that Automattic apparently wants to be three things at the same time. They want to split design from content, AND they want to be agentic, AND they want to be as easy to use as Squarespace.

Jamie does not seem to see why that will never work. Agentic is the easy part: an agent happily writes a theme in code. But splitting design from content makes it feel harder to use than Squarespace, because you cannot edit everything freely. I think that trade-off is worth it, but it is not Squarespace.

The elephant in the room

There is another thing that makes Squarespace easier to use, one that is much harder for WordPress to fix… and Jamie totally ignores it: nobody wants to host a WordPress website. No sysadmin wants to run it, no business owner wants to be responsible for the updates and no freelancer wants to take the blame when a client website gets hacked.

So if you want to compete with Squarespace, you need to offer the same product. They have a visual design editor, a visual content editor AND a website that always works. They take responsibility. Until WordPress fixes all three, it will never compare.

It is painful to watch Jamie fail to understand that, or maybe he is just not willing to think in another direction. He keeps defending WordPress by saying that it is free and has a huge market share. Rino, on the other hand, tries to grasp the complexity of the problem and you can see that he is really open to any solution, but he never quite gets there. Judge for yourself and watch the conversation.

Two WordPresses

To fully understand the problem, you will first have to know that there are two WordPresses. WordPress.org is the free, open-source software. You download it, find a host, install it and from then on it is your problem: updates, plugins, security, backups. WordPress.com is a commercial service by Automattic. They run that same software for you, a bit like Squarespace does. Most people do not know the difference, and the shared name does not help.

Everything for everyone

Squarespace knows exactly who it is for: small businesses that want to build their own website. Everything in the product serves that one customer. No fuss. No worries. Just pay. That is why it feels so simple.

WordPress, on the other hand, tries to cater to everyone. It wants to be Webflow for designers, Squarespace for DIY businesses and an open-source tool for developers, all at the same time. Those are conflicting interests. A designer wants full control over every pixel, a business owner wants as few choices as possible, and a developer wants simple code, not a visual editor. You cannot serve all three with one product. They need to be different products, or you end up with a Frankenstein monster. On top of that they want everything to be backwards compatible. Very noble, but not helpful in this situation.

So, can WordPress survive the AI era?

For DIY businesses there is WordPress.com. It is basically a Squarespace clone, and that is not a bad thing. DIY businesses are the biggest target group, with the most money to spend. As a Squarespace clone, WordPress can survive just fine as a commercial product of Automattic.

For designers, WordPress currently does not deliver. Designers want full control without writing code, and in the AI era that means a really good agentic workflow with a decent user interface behind it. WordPress is not there yet.

For developers, WordPress is simply broken. Not because of the complexity of the code, but because of the elephant in the room: it is insecure, it needs constant updates and somebody has to take the blame when it gets hacked. No developer wants to be that person.

So will WordPress survive? As a Squarespace clone it will. It is too big to fail, I guess. And it seems to be the direction they are heading. But as a tool for designers, it needs much better agentic tools and interfaces. And as a tool for developers, it has to fix the elephant in the room first. So the answer is: it depends on who is asking and how WordPress evolves. For designers and developers, I would not put my money on it.

()  Joost van der Schee