A tribute, 20 years in the making

Thank you,
WordPress.

You gave the world a voice. You turned millions of readers into writers, writers into publishers, and publishers into businesses. The modern web exists because you dared to democratize it. That matters — and we don't forget it.

43%
of all websites
More than the next 10 CMSes combined
835M+
sites worldwide
Built over two decades of trust
60,000+
plugins ever created
The largest CMS ecosystem in history
20yrs
of continuous innovation
From 2003 to today, never stopping

Twenty years of building the web

In May 2003, a 19-year-old named Matt Mullenweg released a piece of software with a modest goal: make publishing on the internet as easy as writing in a notebook. He couldn't have known what would happen next.

WordPress became the backbone of the internet. It powered presidential campaigns, newsrooms, Fortune 500 companies, and a billion personal blogs. It built careers. It launched businesses. It gave a voice to people who had never written a line of code.

2003

WordPress is born

Matt Mullenweg, 19 years old, forks b2/cafelog with Mike Little. WordPress 0.7 ships on May 27. The dream: elegant, well-architected personal publishing software.

2004

The plugin system launches

WordPress 1.2 ships with a plugin hook system. Within months, a community of developers starts extending it. The ecosystem begins.

2005

Themes arrive

WordPress 1.5 introduces the theme system. For the first time, anyone can change how their site looks without touching code.

2007

The Dashboard reimagined

WordPress 2.1 ships a completely redesigned admin. Autosave. Tabbed editing. The bar is raised for every CMS that follows.

2010

WordPress goes everywhere

WordPress 3.0 merges with WPMU, adding multisite. Millions of sites now run on a single WordPress install. The platform becomes infrastructure.

2013

Powers 20% of the web

One in five websites on the entire internet runs WordPress. From blogs to enterprise publishing, it's become the default.

2016

REST API goes core

WordPress adds a REST API to core, opening the door to headless architectures. WordPress is evolving — but the underlying engine stays the same.

2018

Gutenberg ships

WordPress 5.0 replaces the classic editor with a block-based editor. Controversial. Ambitious. A genuine attempt to modernize the authoring experience.

2023

43% of the entire internet

WordPress powers 43% of all websites on the internet. 835 million sites. No other platform comes close. The legacy is undeniable.

The world's biggest names trusted it

From the world's most-read newsrooms to global entertainment brands — WordPress powered them all. That's not a footnote. That's a legacy.

The New Yorker
BBC America
TechCrunch
Rolling Stone
Time Magazine
The White House*
Reuters
MTV News
Variety
National Geographic
PlayStation Blog
The Walt Disney Company
Boing Boing
Harvard Gazette

* The White House used WordPress from 2009–2017

WordPress was built for the 2003 web.
The web has moved on.

This isn't a criticism. It's physics. Every platform has an era. WordPress's era was remarkable — and now the technology it was built on is two decades old. That's not a failure. That's success.

Architecture
Then

Built in 2003 for a single-server LAMP stack. PHP renders every page on request from a MySQL database. It worked brilliantly — for 2003.

Now

The modern web runs at the edge — code executing in 300+ locations simultaneously, databases replicated globally, zero cold starts.

The plugin model
Then

60,000 plugins became 60,000 potential attack vectors. Each one runs with full access to your database and server. One bad actor can take everything down.

Now

Modern plugin systems use isolation — sandboxed execution environments where a plugin failure is contained. Your site stays up.

Security posture
Then

43% market share made WordPress the #1 target for automated attacks. 90% of all hacked CMS sites run WordPress. Not because WordPress is careless — because it's everywhere.

Now

A pre-rendered, edge-deployed site has no PHP to exploit, no database to inject, no login page to brute-force. The attack surface shrinks to near zero.

The update treadmill
Then

Core updates. Theme updates. Plugin updates. Security patches. The average WordPress site requires active maintenance every single week. WordPress didn't design this — the ecosystem grew into it.

Now

Infrastructure that deploys via git push and auto-updates without breaking changes doesn't create a maintenance burden. It just works.

WordPress's values don't retire. Its infrastructure does.

Publishing for everyone

WordPress proved that content management shouldn't require a computer science degree. Your new platform has a full visual editor — click anything on the live site to change it. That standard doesn't go away.

Open and extensible

WordPress taught us that platforms grow through community. The new stack has a plugin system too — just one with guardrails. Extensible, open, and safe by design.

Your content is yours

WordPress's north star was always content ownership. We migrate everything — every post, every page, every image, every redirect. Nothing is left behind. Nothing is locked in.

We handle the move.
You keep what matters.

MigrateDash was built by people who have spent years maintaining WordPress sites — watching the plugin update anxiety, the 3am security breach emails, the hosting bills that don't match the value. We respect WordPress. We just know what comes next.

We are a turnkey migration service. We move your entire WordPress site — every page, every post, every image, every redirect — to a modern, serverless stack that runs on Cloudflare's global edge network. You don't touch a file. We handle everything.

Your visitors get a site that loads in under a second from anywhere in the world. You get lower hosting costs, zero plugin subscriptions, and zero maintenance anxiety. And your SEO doesn't just survive the move — it improves.

Reserve Your Migration
Our promise
  • Every URL preserved or redirected
  • All SEO metadata migrated
  • Search Console monitored post-launch
  • Every image, file, and media item moved
  • Side-by-side quality verification
  • One DNS switch. Zero downtime.

"The best way to honor what WordPress built is to carry it forward on infrastructure worthy of its legacy."