What to run a website on in 2026

For years, choosing a content management system was a question about people: who in the company would edit the website, and how much they could break. In 2026 it has a second reader. Assistants and coding agents now write pages, translate them and change them, and every kind of system is being rebuilt, or sold, on how well it works with them. Here is where the market stands, what AI has changed in each corner of it, and how we would choose.

WordPress, still the default

WordPress runs 40.1 percent of all websites, according to W3Techs on 13 October 2026, and 58.6 percent of the sites whose system W3Techs can identify. Shopify follows with 5.4 percent, Wix with 4.2 and Squarespace with 2.4. Almost a third of all sites, 31.6 percent, show no content management system that W3Techs can detect.

WordPress has brought AI into its core. Version 7.0, released on 20 May, added an AI Client that lets a site talk to generative models, with the connections managed on one screen, and pairs it with the Abilities API, through which plugins describe what they can do. An optional AI plugin writes titles and excerpts, generates and edits images and suggests alt text.

The old burden remains. Patchstack counted 11'334 new vulnerabilities in the WordPress ecosystem in 2025, 42 percent more than in 2024. 91 percent were in plugins and only six in core, and 46 percent had no fix ready when they were made public.

Nor is the fight at the top resolved. It began in September 2024, when Matt Mullenweg, who leads the project and the company Automattic, publicly criticised the host WP Engine for contributing too little and cut it off from WordPress.org. WP Engine sued in October, and in December a court ordered its access restored. On 28 September 2026 Search Engine Journal reported that the judge had let all four of WP Engine’s antitrust claims proceed, while Automattic’s counterclaims also survive at least in part. Two years on, there is no outcome, only a longer case.

Headless, and written for agents

A headless CMS keeps the content apart from the website: structured entries in one store, delivered through an API to a site, an app or anything else that asks. Sanity, Contentful, Storyblok and Payload are the best known names. W3Techs puts Sanity, Storyblok and Payload each below 0.1 percent of websites, but such counts struggle to see them, because a headless system leaves few traces on the finished page.

AI has handed these systems a new argument. In March, Sanity’s chief executive Magnus Hillestad wrote: “Content has become context. And context has become infrastructure.” Agents that answer customers or quote prices need exact facts, he argues, not pages to interpret, and content should reach them through APIs and MCP servers as well as through websites. It is a vendor’s essay, but in our experience the point holds: an agent works far better with clean fields than with a page of formatted text.

The field is consolidating too. In June 2025 Payload, an open source CMS built for Next.js, joined Figma. Payload says it remains open source and can still be self hosted.

Builders that start with a sentence

Site builders hold much of the rest: Wix and Squarespace for small companies, Webflow at 0.8 percent and Framer at 0.2 percent for design led teams, most of them now with AI that drafts layouts and text. A newer group starts from a description instead of a template, and Wix now owns one of them, Base44.

In August Wix reported that Base44 drove its revenue growth, but also that it had entered the year with an adjusted gross margin near zero. Its own model, Base 1, is meant to lower the cost of running the AI, and Wix expects about 60 percent in the second half. For a buyer that is a useful signal. In our view these builders are the fastest way to a first site, and their prices will follow the compute behind them. Before the site grows, check what you can take with you.

No CMS at all

At the other end, some teams have dropped the CMS. In December 2025 Lee Robinson, who works at Cursor, moved cursor.com from a headless CMS to plain code and Markdown files. He had expected one to two weeks. With agents it took three days, 344 agent requests and 260.32 dollars in tokens.

His reason: “With AI and coding agents, the cost of an abstraction has never been higher.” In a repository, an agent can change any file. Behind a CMS, it has to go through someone else’s interface.

Sanity, the system he left, answered that he had rebuilt one: a screen to manage images and files, user management through GitHub permissions, version control through git, localisation tooling and a content model in Markdown front matter. “The weird twist here is that we sort of agree with Lee’s take,” wrote Sanity’s Knut Melvær.

Both are right. For a site run by developers, with few editors and a short list of pages, a repository and an agent are often enough. For twenty editors in five languages, the features Sanity listed are the job.

What we would choose

Start with three questions. Who edits the site, and how often. How a change is checked before it goes live, whether a person or an agent made it. And who owns the content on the day you leave.

For a small site with one editor, a builder is fine, as long as the content can leave with you. If WordPress works for you, with few plugins and a named person who keeps them current, there is no rush to move. Where content runs across channels, editors and languages, structured content in a headless system serves people and agents alike. And a site run by developers can live in code, with an agent doing the edits and a person reviewing every release.

We built Studio for the case in between: a marketing team that edits every day, with agents that help. It is a CMS on top of sites built in Next.js, Vite or TanStack, with no plugins and no PHP on the public site. Editors click a word to change it, the assistant drafts and a person decides. Every publish is checked, built once, tested, made live, verified and rolled back on its own if anything fails, and it commits the content to the company’s own repository. Studio is in early access.