WordPress Powers 43% of the Internet: Why It Is the Only Serious Choice for Your Business Website

You are about to make one of the most important decisions for your business, and most of the advice you are getting is wrong.

Friends tell you Wix is easy. Your nephew says Squarespace looks better. A designer quoted you €3,500 for "something custom." And you are standing there wondering which platform to trust with your business website, the thing that customers find before they ever find you.

Here is the short answer: WordPress. Not because it is trendy. Because roughly 43% of the entire internet runs on it, according to W3Techs' latest tracking data ^[1]. That is not a niche tool. That is the infrastructure of the modern web.

The Number That Ends the Argument

When somewhere between 4 and 5 out of every 10 websites on the planet run on the same platform, that tells you something no sales pitch can. It tells you the platform works. It tells you thousands of developers maintain it, improve it, and fix problems quickly. It tells you it will still be here in ten years.

Wix powers roughly 3% of websites globally. Squarespace sits at a similar figure. Shopify, often positioned as the obvious choice for selling online, manages around 5% ^[1]. These are not bad platforms. But they are small platforms. And for a business owner making a long-term decision about where their online presence lives, scale matters.

WordPress holds approximately 62% of the entire CMS market ^[1]. That means if a website uses any content management system at all, the odds are better than six in ten that it chose WordPress. Every day, according to W3Techs, more than 1,000 new WordPress sites join the top 10 million websites they track. Those are not hobbyists. Those are businesses choosing the platform that gives them the best chance of still being online, still being supported, and still being flexible five years from now.

You Own It. Full Stop.

WordPress is open source. That means nobody owns it, which means nobody can take it away from you.

This matters more than most business owners realise. With Wix or Squarespace, you are renting space inside someone else's system. Your content lives on their servers, formatted in their proprietary way. If they raise prices, you pay or you leave. If they discontinue a feature you depend on, you adapt or you rebuild. If you decide to move, you discover that "exporting your data" gives you a fraction of what you actually built.

WordPress is different. Your site, your database, your content, your design, it all belongs to you. You can move it between hosting providers. You can modify any part of it. You can install any of the more than 62,000 plugins available on WordPress.org ^[2], or hire any developer in the world to customise it, because WordPress skills are everywhere.

For a business owner, that is not a technical detail. That is insurance. It means no single company can hold your website hostage.

One trade-off worth knowing: that ownership comes with maintenance responsibility. WordPress core and plugins need regular updates, and ignoring them opens security gaps. On a managed hosting platform, those updates are handled automatically. But if you are running WordPress on bare-bones shared hosting with no management layer, updates become your job. Know what you are signing up for.

The Walled Garden Trap

Let me be direct with you. Platforms like Wix and Squarespace are beautifully marketed. They show you polished templates and promise simplicity. And for the first few months, they deliver.

Then you hit the walls.

You want a booking system that works the way your business actually operates. Not available. You want to add a membership area for loyal customers. Not supported, or only on the most expensive plan. You want your site to load faster for mobile visitors. You have no control over the server, the caching, or the infrastructure.

Picture this scenario, because it happens more often than you would think. A Kilkenny craft brewery selling online discovers that their platform takes a transaction fee on every sale, on top of the monthly subscription. They want to switch payment providers. They cannot. They want to integrate with their accounting software. The integration does not exist. They are locked in, paying more each year for less flexibility than WordPress would have given them from day one.

With WordPress, if a feature does not exist, someone has probably already built a plugin for it. If not, any developer can build one. The ecosystem is not controlled by a single company's product roadmap.

"But WordPress Is Too Technical"

This is the objection I hear most often on calls with business owners. And three years ago, it had some truth to it.

Not anymore.

AI website builders have removed the skills barrier entirely. You describe your business, what you do, where you are, what matters to your customers, and AI builds a professional WordPress site in under a minute. No code. No design skills. No waiting weeks for a developer to return your calls.

This is the shift that changes everything. WordPress was always the most powerful and flexible platform. The only thing holding non-technical people back was the setup process. AI solved that problem. The combination of WordPress flexibility with AI simplicity means there is genuinely no reason to settle for a walled garden anymore.

Web60 built its entire platform around this idea. Describe your business, get a WordPress site in 60 seconds, with everything included for €60 per year, hosting, SSL, backups, security, analytics. No agency fees. No hourly charges for content updates. No renewal surprises.

The Real Cost of the Alternative

Here is where the numbers get uncomfortable for anyone considering a web design agency.

According to multiple Irish web design pricing guides published this year, a standard small business website from an agency costs between €1,500 and €3,000 at the lower end, with many agencies quoting €4,000 to €8,000 for anything beyond a basic brochure site ^[3]. On top of that, hosting and maintenance typically run €600 to €1,500 per year.

So you are looking at a minimum of roughly €2,000 in year one, plus ongoing costs that accumulate every year after. And every time you want a text change or a new page, you are back on the phone to someone charging €75 to €150 per hour. The website plans available today in Ireland make agency pricing look like a relic of a different era. Because it is.

Compare that to building it yourself with AI on WordPress. You get the same professional result, possibly a better one because nobody understands your business like you do, for a fraction of the cost. The era of paying thousands for someone else to interpret your business and build you a website is ending. Not because agencies are bad at what they do. Because AI has made their core offering, building a standard business website, something the business owner can do better and faster themselves.

The Honest Exception

If you are running a complex ecommerce operation with thousands of products, custom integrations with warehouse management systems, and a dedicated development team, a specialist platform with bespoke development genuinely makes more sense. Enterprise-scale operations have enterprise-scale needs, and a standard WordPress setup is not always the right fit for businesses processing millions in annual transactions with complex logistics behind them.

But that is not most businesses. If you run a consultancy, a restaurant, a professional services firm, a retail shop, or a trade business, you do not need enterprise infrastructure. You need a professional website that works, loads fast, gets found on Google, and costs less than most business owners expect.

The Platform Decision Is Simpler Than You Think

You are choosing between a platform that powers 43% of the internet, with 62,000 plugins, full ownership of your data, and an ecosystem of millions of developers, or a walled garden that looks impressive in the brochure but starts restricting you the moment you need it to do something it was not designed for.

WordPress won this argument years ago. AI just made it accessible to everyone. The question is not whether WordPress is the right platform. It is whether you are going to build on it yourself for €60 a year, or pay someone €5,000 to do a slower version of the same thing.

Your business deserves a platform that grows with it. Not one that locks you in and charges you for the privilege.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is WordPress difficult to use without technical skills?

Not anymore. AI website builders generate a complete, professional WordPress site from a text description of your business. You manage content through a visual editor that works like a word processor. The technical complexity that once made WordPress intimidating has been abstracted away entirely.

Can I move my website if I want to change hosting providers?

Yes. Because WordPress is open source, you own your site completely. Your content, your design, your database can all be exported and moved to any WordPress hosting provider. This is not possible with proprietary platforms like Wix or Squarespace, where your site is tied into their system.

Why is WordPress better than Wix or Squarespace for a business website?

WordPress offers full ownership, over 62,000 plugins for any functionality you need, and runs roughly 43% of the internet, meaning support, developers, and resources are everywhere. Wix and Squarespace limit what you can do, charge more as you grow, and make it difficult to leave. For a business making a long-term platform decision, WordPress offers flexibility that closed platforms cannot match.

How much should a business website cost in Ireland in 2026?

Agency-built websites typically cost between €1,500 and €8,000 upfront, with €600 to €1,500 per year in ongoing hosting and maintenance. AI-powered WordPress platforms like Web60 offer professional websites for €60 per year, everything included. The gap exists because AI has automated the design and setup work that agencies previously charged thousands for.

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