On December 16, 2024, Matt Mullenweg took the stage at Tokyo Node Hall in Tokyo, Japan to deliver the annual State of the Word, offering the WordPress community a clear look at where our platform stands and where it’s heading.
Even in a year marked by a troubling legal dispute with WP Engine, Matt started the presentation on a surprisingly upbeat note. He pointed to the city of Tokyo and its blend of tradition and progress as a metaphor for what WordPress aims to achieve: lasting relevance, continuous improvement, and a focus on how it feels to use the web rather than just how it looks on the surface.
From my point of view, the key conclusions were that WordPress remains strong and growing, the tools are getting more intuitive, and the community continues to thrive worldwide. (Go team WordPress! 👊)
Mullenweg wants the community to keep moving toward a more open and flexible future, one driven by collaboration and perhaps guided by the principle of “Kansei engineering,” which Matt mentioned as inspiration.
In the sections that follow, I’ll try to break down the details of the keynote and highlight some of the more interesting pieces.
📹 Want to see the original recording? The entire stream on YouTube is 3 hours and 40 minutes long. The action starts around the 1-hour and 17-minute mark, featuring a surprising piano performance.
Kansei engineering and design philosophy
One of the ideas Matt highlighted this year was the aforementioned “Kansei engineering,” a Japanese design method from the 1970s.
In his words, “At its heart it’s this idea that excellence of design just isn’t about how something looks or works, but fundamentally how it feels to use and how it resonates with people on almost an instinctive level.”
You can decide on your own what this means for you exactly. Nonetheless, it’s a great reminder that whether you’re writing a blog post, crafting a plugin, or designing a theme, the response a user has truly matters.
This focus on the human element of design speaks to the core of WordPress’ goals. While we’ve always talked about accessibility and usability, “Kansei engineering” is one more helper we can use to point ourselves toward thinking even more deeply about the way users experience every interaction.
Historical context and where WordPress is today
Mullenweg reminded us that Japan actually holds a special place in WordPress history. He said that:
“Back in 2003, Japan was the very first language that localized WordPress … even before we had a translation framework.”
These days, of course, it’s a completely different story – with WordPress being available in more than 180 locales if I’m not mistaken.
The community’s global footprint has surely grown to an impressive scale. According to the data shared by Matt, WordPress now powers 43.6% of all websites worldwide and claims a 62.3% share of all CMS usage.
Its next closest competitor, Shopify, sits at 6.6%.
Have the rumors of WordPress’ death been greatly exaggerated? This wouldn’t be the first time. 🤔
In Japan, the numbers are even more impressive: WordPress now runs on 58.5% of websites there and dominates with an 83% share of the CMS market. Compare this to Shopify’s 2.7%, and you see just how popular WordPress is in that part of the world.
Non-English usage of WordPress continues to rise, with languages like Spanish and German gaining ground. Matt also pointed out that German usage recently passed Japanese usage, which might inspire more local contributions to reclaim the spot (jokingly).
Speaking for myself here: a 43.6% market share is absolutely massive! Let’s not forget we’re talking about all websites – including ones created in 1996 running stone-age scripts, sites without any CMS, and sites abandoned years ago. While I don’t believe WordPress will surpass the 50% mark, where we are now is still a huge win. 💪
Gutenberg and “the roadmap”
This year’s State of the Word made it clear that Gutenberg’s evolution is still front and center. Since the last State of the Word, there have been three major WordPress releases:
- 6.5, named after jazz violinist Regina Carter,
- 6.6, named after the American big band leader Tommy Dorsey, and
- 6.7, named in honor of the saxophonist Sonny Rollins.
The 6.7 release also marked the project’s 50th major version milestone!
Setting this aside, Mullenweg also reminded us of Gutenberg and its famous roadmap:
He highlighted that we’re in phase 3 now and then introduced Matías Ventura, Gutenberg lead architect, to explain how the team is making the platform more user-friendly and flexible. Ventura showed us new features like moving blocks around in an intuitive way, adding comments directly to blocks and a notifications framework that alerts you to changes. These improvements aim to help multiple people work together smoothly, much like editing a Google Doc.
The progress for WordPress goes beyond collaboration in Gutenberg, though.
In the past twelve months, over 1,700 new themes appeared in the directory, setting a record. More than 1,000 of these are block themes, letting you customize your entire site layout with Gutenberg blocks.
On the plugin side, 2.35 billion downloads have been made this year so far and over 3 billion plugin updates served.
One thing in particular that Matt was very happy about was the improvement in the plugin review process – from a queue that once took 79 days to clear, down to zero in October.
Thanks to the plugin check tool, he mentions, reviewers saw “41% fewer issues approved per plugin” and approved “138% more plugins every single week.”
All these advances – faster reviews, more themes, more flexible editing modes, and the launch into collaboration features – are all great, and I think they highlight the commitment within the WordPress community. This means a more powerful, efficient, and adaptable WordPress experience at every turn for everyone.
Performance, developer experience, and data liberation
Ventura’s presentation also highlighted new tools and methods aimed at improving performance and developer workflows. He discussed “block bindings,” which let you link blocks to various data sources without locking the content into the page’s HTML. There was also a mention of “data views,” which provide more flexible ways of displaying and editing structured content within the WordPress dashboard. These updates simplify data handling, enable complex site building with less coding, and keep content and design separate.
Also in performance-related stories, responsive design controls are set to improve next year, letting you tailor how elements look at different screen sizes. The plan is to let users switch to mobile previews, make changes there, and have those changes only affect that specific breakpoint. That would be awesome, if you ask me!
For developers, you’ll be able to customize breakpoints, giving you both ease of use and the flexibility you need.
Another highlight was Playground, which can run WordPress right in your browser. We talked about it on WPShout a while back. Playground now supports multiple instances, works offline as a PWA, and integrates “blueprints” to help you spin up a preconfigured WordPress environment in seconds.
This tool simplifies testing, education, and onboarding new users already, as anyone can jump right into WordPress without the usual setup pains.
Finally, the “Data Liberation” initiative, introduced last year, was brought up again. Mullenweg’s vision here is to ensure that your site’s data can move freely across systems. He demonstrated importing EPUB files and capturing site designs as WordPress blocks – though at this stage it’s just a concept demo if I’m getting it correctly.
The power of community and open source commitment
This year emphasized the importance of community and open-source values. Mary Hubbard, WordPress’ new Executive Director, addressed ongoing legal tensions, saying, “WP Engine is taking legal action against us” – it being the only mention of the lawsuit in the entire State of the Word, btw.
She emphasized on the need to protect the WordPress trademark, ensuring that “when you choose WordPress, you should get WordPress.”
She then went on to present some of the numbers that showcase the strength of the WordPress community.
- The WordPress YouTube channel hitting 63,400 subscribers
- 2.27 million people following WordPress across platforms,
- over 28.5 million tuning into streamed events.
She also mentioned that the last three releases were fueled by contributions from 1,097 developers.
Something that was true about WordPress ever since the beginning continues to be true today as well – it’s the WordPress community that ensures the platform thrives for everyone. 🤝
OpenVerse and free resources
OpenVerse, the open-licensed media directory integrated into WordPress, was highlighted as “a gift for all of us.” It offers a vast library of openly licensed content, now including 884 million images (up 13%) and over 4.2 million audio files (up 59%). These resources are free and ready for use in any project.
OpenVerse sees heavy usage, too, with “nearly 4 million page views this month” and over 21 million API requests, showing its value for users across platforms, not just WordPress.
👉 We talked about what’s going on in the WordPress community-submitted Photo Directory very recently, btw. Check it out here.
Future outlook and my conclusion
Matt closed by contemplating a future where WordPress is even more open, flexible, and user-friendly. He described a world where AI enables site creation in minutes while preserving complete creative control.
He mentioned that one of the recent speed-building challenges showcased this potential, with AI helping a participant build a site faster than someone working manually (see on YouTube). Though, in my view, not a great mention from Matt, given his own recent struggles in a speed build challenge like that.
WordPress is certainly moving forward. No matter the legal battles, the community as well as the tech is going to go forward. Matt Mullenweg certainly chose to set a hopeful tone, and the keynote brought together a wide range of updates that matter to us as those who use and contributes to WordPress.
I personally enjoyed the extreme minimalism of the entire presentation and its slides. I’m sure this was not an accidental design choice but rather a deliberate message to emphasize what truly matters in everyone’s website experience – and what doesn’t – tying back to the principles of “Kansei engineering.”
As we head into the next year, I hope you’ll feel encouraged to keep experimenting, contributing, and innovating!
What did you think of this year’s State of the Word?
I don’t see why collaboration is being integrated into the core. It may benefit agencies and enterprise users, but I question whether most WP users will use it. There is not much meat on the bones from this year’s SOTW. Mary seemed surprisingly nervous on camera, which surprised me, given her background at TikTok.
I can see collaboration useful for working on content, where you want to get people’s feedback a lot on the article you’re working on.
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