WordPress History: What It Means for Your Small Business

WordPress was first released on 27 May 2003 by Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little, which makes it a little over 23 years old. That makes it one of the longest-running pieces of software still actively used on the web today — and, at the time of writing, it powers around 40% of all websites, and close to six in ten of the sites that use any content management system at all (W3Techs, September 2026).

Those numbers are worth knowing. But if you’re running a small business, the more useful question isn’t really “how old is WordPress” — it’s “does its history tell me anything about whether it’s a safe, sensible choice for my own website?” We think it does, so that’s what the rest of this article is about.

What WordPress actually is

WordPress is what’s called a content management system, or CMS for short — a tool that lets you build and update the words, pages and images on a website without needing to write code. Before tools like this existed, changing a single sentence on your own website usually meant paying a developer to do it for you. WordPress, and CMSs like it, put that control back in the hands of the business owner.

It started life as something much smaller than that, though.

Where it came from — the short version

In 2003, blogging was still a fairly new idea, and a piece of blogging software called b2/cafelog had recently stalled — its original developer had gone quiet, leaving a small community of users without updates. Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little decided to pick up that codebase and build on it, releasing the first version of WordPress the same year.

For its first few years, WordPress really was mostly a blogging tool. The features that made it useful for a proper business website came later and arrived gradually: themes (2005), which let you change how a site looks without touching the underlying content; plugins (2004 onwards), which let other developers add features WordPress didn’t have built in; and, much later, WooCommerce (2011), which turned WordPress into a genuine option for running an online shop.

What’s stayed constant the whole way through is that WordPress is open source — the underlying code is free, and anyone can contribute to it or build on it. That’s a deliberate, unusual choice, and it explains most of what’s good and what’s risky about building your business on WordPress, which is what the rest of this article covers.

Why this history actually matters for your business

Being open source and over two decades old means three practical things for a small business owner, not just trivia points:

It’s unlikely to disappear on you. Plenty of proprietary website platforms have shut down, changed pricing overnight, or been bought out and quietly deprioritised. Because WordPress’s code isn’t owned by one company that could pull the plug, a WordPress site you own isn’t dependent on one business staying afloat.

There’s a genuinely large pool of people who can help you. Because so many sites run on it, and it’s been around so long, finding a developer, an agency, or even a knowledgeable friend who can help with a WordPress site is usually easier — and cheaper — than for a smaller, more obscure platform.

Nothing about its age makes a website automatically good. This cuts both ways: WordPress being popular and long-lived says nothing about whether your particular WordPress site is well built, secure, or fast. A 23-year track record is a reason to trust the software itself, not a reason to skip checking the site built on top of it.

Example: choosing a platform for a new site

Imagine a self-employed electrician putting up their first proper website, currently deciding between WordPress and an all-in-one website builder like Wix or Squarespace. The builder looks simpler at first glance. But WordPress’s age and size mean that if they outgrow the free theme they started with, want to add online booking, or ever want to switch who manages the site, there’s a large, competitive market of people and tools able to do that work — rather than being tied to one company’s own toolkit and pricing. That flexibility, not the software’s age itself, is the actual benefit.

Example: inheriting an old WordPress site

Now imagine a small accountancy practice that took over a WordPress website built by a previous marketing company five years ago, and nobody has touched it since. The owner worries the whole platform might be “out of date.” In practice, WordPress itself updates automatically in most cases, and the core software is still actively maintained today, over two decades after that first 2003 release. The real risk in this situation almost never comes from WordPress itself — it’s from the specific theme and plugins that were installed back then and never updated, which is a very different, and much more fixable, problem.

Limitations and risks worth knowing

It’s easy to read a “history of WordPress” piece as an advert for WordPress. It shouldn’t be one, so here’s the part an advert would leave out:

• Being open source cuts both ways. Anyone can build a WordPress theme or plugin, which means quality varies enormously — from excellent, actively maintained code to abandoned plugins nobody’s touched in years.
• Popularity attracts attackers, too. Because so many sites run on WordPress, it’s a common target for automated attacks. This isn’t a reason to avoid it — it’s a reason a neglected WordPress site (old plugins, no updates, a weak password) is genuinely more exposed than a well-maintained one.
• “Free” doesn’t mean “no cost.” The WordPress software itself is free, but a proper small business website still needs paid hosting, usually a paid theme or some design work, and ongoing maintenance. Anyone promising a completely free, fully finished website is skipping over real costs somewhere.
• Its age is not a guarantee of quality. As above — a 23-year track record belongs to the software, not automatically to the specific website built with it.

Getting started without wasting money

If you’re weighing up WordPress for your own business, the practical, unglamorous questions matter more than its history:

• Know what you’re actually paying for. The software is free; hosting, a decent theme, and someone’s time to set it up properly are not. Be wary of a quote that seems too low to cover all three.
• Don’t over-build on day one. A five-page website with the essentials done well will usually serve a small business better, and cost less, than a large site with features you don’t yet need.
• Ask who’s responsible for keeping it updated. This is the single biggest factor in whether a WordPress site stays safe over time, and it’s a fair question to ask any developer or agency before you commit.

If you’d rather have that side handled for you, we build and look after small business WordPress websites — including affordable first websites for startups and smaller businesses who don’t need, or want to pay for, anything more elaborate than that.

Frequently asked questions

When was WordPress created?

WordPress was first released on 27 May 2003, built by Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little on top of an older, abandoned piece of blogging software called b2/cafelog.

How old is WordPress?

As of 2026, WordPress is a little over 23 years old — one of the longest-running pieces of actively maintained software still widely used on the web.

Who created WordPress?

Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little created WordPress in 2003, picking up the abandoned b2/cafelog codebase after its original developer stopped maintaining it.

Who owns WordPress?

No single company owns WordPress. It’s open source, and the WordPress® trademark is held by the non-profit WordPress Foundation — a deliberate step, taken in 2010, to keep the project independent rather than under one company’s control.

The short version

WordPress has been around since 2003, it’s free and open source, and it now runs a huge share of the web. None of that guarantees your own website is in good shape — but it does mean that if something needs fixing, updating, or improving, you’re never short of people who know how to do it.