Ten WordPress Predictions for 2025

The past year, 2024, has had a lot of ups and downs. Things are ripe for a lot of change. Today I’m looking at my 2025 predictions for WordPress and the WordPress ecosystem.

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WP Engine vs Automattic and Matt Mullenweg

Let’s start with the elephant that has been trampling around the community lately. And that is the conflict between WP Engine on the one hand and Automattic / Matt Mullenweg on the other, along with everything else that has followed on from it. What I see is that Matt is not interested in having WordPress return to, let’s call it, a quiet state. I think he believes that WordPress is so good that no matter what he says or does, people will continue using it. That by subsidizing WordPress.org over the years, he’s created a dependency, kind of like a drug addiction. And now people can’t stop using it.

Prediction One: A Clear Alternative to Matt-Controlled Space

My first prediction is if Matt continues the bad behavior, then some clear alternative will emerge. Now, what that’ll look like, I’m not sure. Maybe it’ll be a straight fork. Maybe it’ll be a downstream distro like model, the way that Ubuntu is a downstream distribution based on Debian. Maybe there’ll be a new WordPress flavor that is based on Core, but that layers on top of it, and add features and changes that have been neglected in Core over the last several years.

Prediction Two: How the Court Case Will Shake Out

The second prediction is in relation to the court case itself. Matt, I think, will have some limited success in relation to his trademark claims. However, I think he will lose on all other points. And that leads to the third prediction. I think that will be something of a rude awakening or wake up call for Matt and that he’ll move the distribution functionality under automatic. I don’t think that will have a super huge impact in terms of functionality of WordPress sites immediately, but it may have some ramifications for the ecosystem overall over time.

WordPress and AI

Now let’s move from the conflict with WP Engine to talk about WordPress Core and AI, because, of course, there have to be some AI predictions.

Prediction Four: Forking Will Be Much Easier with AI

So my fourth prediction is that someone will fork WordPress using AI. In fact, I think the major hurdle the community has to jump over isn’t forking the code itself, but is in finding a way to provide an alternative ecosystem.

Prediction Five: An LLM in Core for Translation

Now, the fifth prediction also involves AI. I think an open source large language model will be included in WordPress Core for translation purposes. In other words, I don’t think there’s any reason any longer to wait on the sequential completion of Gutenberg steps. Remember, translation is the final or fourth step. At this point, I don’t think there’s any new information that will make a big difference. And as has been hinted, I think that AI will be the solution for enabling translations in Core.

2025 Will Be the Year of the Page Builder

Now, moving on from Core, I believe that 2025 will be the year of the page builder. I know that is counter to what many people think. Many people think that Gutenberg and the Site Editor will become so good that page builders are just going to fade away. But I think that there will always be a place for page builders as long as WordPress is flexible enough to support them. And indeed, I think in 2025, we’re going to see a second Spring for page builders.

Prediction Six: The Divi 5 Rewrite Will Be A Success

So my sixth prediction is that the Divi 5 rewrite will be a success. Props to the Divi team at Elegant Themes. Divi is one of the first and a leading page builder, which is attractive to many designers, and a number of agencies have built their business around Divi. Props to the Divi team for recognizing that it needs to be updated and for having the guts, fortitude, and will to go ahead and do the work that needs to be done to keep it relevant.

Prediction Seven: Etch Gets Off to a Good Start

The seventh prediction is also related to the page builder space, and this is in relation to Etch. Etch is a budding page builder being developed by Kevin Geary and his team. The market share of Oxygen, as well as the popularity of Bricks and the popularity of even the Site Editor from a code perspective, all indicate that there is a good market for a code first, code aware, or also code page builder. So my seventh prediction is that Etch will become more popular than expected, especially if the team can avoid over engineering it.

Block Themes Have Been Held Back

My eighth prediction is also related more or less to page builders, and that is in relation to block themes. Block themes have not taken off the way that I think was expected. They’re popular with theme developers, and in some ways block themes have hearkened back to the old days of niche themes. If you were involved in WordPress a number of years ago, you remember that there were lots of niche themes. You would get a theme if you wanted like a site for a lawyer, a site for a writer, for a book author, or a site for a nonprofit. You would go and get a particular niche theme for that particular purpose. But then general purpose themes came along with page builders, and niche themes took a backseat as these general purpose Classic themes just racked up the active installs. And I think that the limitations of the current block theme ecosystem have held it back. And that’s not related to block themes itself, but rather what can be done given the constraints of the theme directory. If you think about it, pretty much all of the big progress in WordPress has happened because third party developers got involved to show what could be done and just expanded the envelope. They haven’t been able to do that yet for block themes. But I think in 2025 we’ll start to see that happen.

Prediction Eight: Block Themes Gain Traction

And that’s my eighth prediction that third party developers will break out of the constraints of the current block theme ecosystem. They will provide more services within block themes themselves or within companion plugins, not only to make them competitive or equal or comparative to general purpose Classic themes, but maybe even to enable more features of the Site Editor that we just haven’t seen yet.

Economy and Pricing

Moving from page builders to the economy and pricing, there has been a trend in the WordPress ecosystem for prices to rise. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. Prices in general seem to have been kind of low, but some of the big players have made rather bold and perhaps temporarily painful moves to push the ceiling higher. As a result, we’ve seen a number of products launch with higher pricing or raise their pricing. Now, for established products or for companies that have a track record of delivering high quality products, I think that makes a lot of sense and I don’t have any problem with it.

One thing I have noticed however is that a number of new players, new developers who are trying to break into the WordPress market. They see these high prices and they launch their new products with these high prices and they fail terribly. They end up having to have it on steep discount, you know, like 80-90 percent discount for over a year before they can get to a stable price. And that’s something with pricing that I find distasteful. This anchor pricing that some companies have that’s so unrealistic, it’s like an insult to our intelligence. They would never be able to sell it for that amount. So it’s not a prediction, but it’s my hope that the community will start to push back against unrealistic anchor pricing.

Prediction Nine: Prices Continue to Rise

But my prediction is that WordPress prices will continue to rise for established products, but that new products will find it even more difficult than they have in the past to break in because they won’t know how to price and market themselves.

Prediction Ten: A Shift from Lifetime Products to Lifetime Discounts

And this brings me to my last, my tenth prediction. And that is not related to WordPress specifically. It’s related to AppSumo. AppSumo is popular among a lot of WordPress users. AppSumo is a site that offers lifetime products at attractive prices. Over the past year we’ve seen a number of deals, some of them from AppSumo, some launched on other platforms, but there have been a number of lifetime deals that have either failed totally or where the companies have in one way or another not honored terms of their lifetime sale. AppSumo has done a good thing. They’ve started to refund, at least partially, customers who purchased a lifetime deal if it closed within the last year. I commend them for that, but my prediction is that in 2025, we’ll see AppSumo add to their marketplace deals that are based on lifetime discounts instead of or in addition to lifetime packages.

What Are Your Thoughts?

Those are my predictions for 2025. Did I get it wrong or do you agree with me? Did I miss something really big? Please share your thoughts in the comments below or if you’re on Facebook in the Dynamic WordPress Facebook group.