Like most areas of technology these days, AI remains the dominant theme for WordPress in the news for 2025.
GoDaddy is the latest to join the trend with its new “Airo Site Designer”, which can build a complete WordPress site from text prompts. Previous versions of this idea from other developers have been disappointing — while these tools can generate themes and populate them with content and images, the quality has often been subpar.
In the few projects we’ve reviewed for clients, we ended up doing a fresh WordPress install, salvaging a bit of AI-generated content, and rebuilding the site from scratch. With more refined prompting and tuning, though, these AI builders will likely become genuinely useful for users who aren’t seasoned WordPress developers.
Upcoming WordPress 6.9 Release
The next major release, WordPress 6.9, is scheduled for December 2, 2025.
New “Notes” Feature
A new developer-oriented Abilities API will let AI and automation tools interact safely with site features and permissions.
Performance and Editing Improvements
Expect better theme performance and a smoother block editing workflow.
The most exciting part of this release is the continued advancement of API, AI integration, and automation tools. Many of these focus on content creation, but workflow automation and chatbot systems are also becoming more capable.
At our agency, we’ve been using Divi’s AI prompt features to autofill meta descriptions and content placeholders. Previously, we would generate this content in ChatGPT and manually paste it into WordPress. Having these tools built directly into the WordPress admin interface saves time and streamlines the workflow.
WordPress Growth and Market Trends News
According to HostingAdvice, WordPress’s growth has slowed significantly. Its global market share increased only slightly — from 43.2% to 43.6% between 2022 and 2025.
Meanwhile, SaaS website builders such as Wix, Shopify, and HubSpot continue to gain traction. I don’t expect hand-coded HTML sites to make a major comeback, but for the first time, WordPress could start losing ground to these SaaS providers.
Shopify and HubSpot, in particular, have become strong competitors. Personally, I haven’t had to work with Wix or Squarespace in years — and I’m perfectly fine keeping it that way.
Plugins and Themes on the Rise in 2025
The number of plugins submitted to the official WordPress.org directory has nearly doubled in 2025 — an 87% year-over-year increase, according to the official Plugins Team.
This surge is clearly linked to the rise of AI tools. Coding has become easier, allowing even modestly skilled developers to release software that would have been out of reach just a few years ago.
Fortunately, review times have stayed short, thanks to AI-driven scanning tools that help automate plugin reviews.
Security Breaches and Patches
There’s been a noticeable increase in security patches, especially for plugins and themes using non-authenticated endpoints.
However, this doesn’t necessarily mean security is getting worse — rather, AI-powered detection and reporting have made it easier to identify vulnerabilities. Developers are also getting faster at patching their code.
Two of the most significant exploits this year involved the Post SMTP plugin and one of the popular event management plugins. This is a contastant theme for WordPress in the News for many years now, at least on the SMTP front.
WordPress in the Newws: Hosting in 2025
There haven’t been any major shakeups in our hosting environments in 2025 — in fact, things have been unusually stable.
One of our premium hosting providers has finally stopped inflating our bills with unnecessary overage fees and toned down its aggressive upselling campaigns.
Meanwhile, our lower-end hosting provider has been surprisingly reliable, and we’ve been impressed with SiteGround’s mid-tier performance — especially after taking over management of several large sites on their platform.
Hopefully, I haven’t jinxed us by saying that everything is running smoothly in the ever-volatile world of WordPress hosting.
WP Egineee vs Automattic News
You can’t really write a blog post about WordPress in the news without mentioning the legal battle between two of the biggest players in the industry. The dispute began a few years ago, when Automattic (the company that controls WordPress.com and WooCommerce) restricted WP Engine’s access to automatic updates and started demanding licensing fees.
The argument centers largely around the use of the “WordPress” and “WP” trademarks, but it quickly turned personal and messy. For now, WP Engine has secured a preliminary injunction against Automattic and regained access to the repositories and updates it relies on.
There hasn’t been much movement in the case throughout 2025 beyond the early procedural phases. If it does go to trial, it’s expected to happen sometime in late 2026 at the earliest.