On December 2, WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg, Executive Director Mary Hubbard, and Lead Architect Matías Ventura took the stage in San Francisco — joined by contributors and guests from around the world.

And for the first time, a major WordPress release launched live during the keynote — WordPress 6.9 went out to the world as the audience watched.

If you missed the livestream, you can watch the full recording below:

Our favorite highlights from 2025

2025 was a milestone year for WordPress. The project shipped two major releases, welcomed record numbers of first-time contributors, and saw global adoption accelerate — especially in non-English markets. 

Here’s what stood out:

• WordPress continues to power the open web. About 43% of all websites run on WordPress, with roughly 60% CMS market share. Among the top 1,000 sites, adoption grew to 49.4% — up 2.3% from last year.

• A truly global community. For the first time, over 56% of WordPress sites are in languages other than English. Japanese became the second-most-used language, with Japan reaching 58.5% website share and 83% CMS share.

• A thriving ecosystem. Over 60,000 plugins are now available, with downloads on track to hit 2.1 billion by year’s end. Block theme adoption grew over 40%, passing 1,000 themes.

• Record contributor numbers. WordPress 6.8 had 921 contributors. WordPress 6.9 brought over 900, including 230 first-timers.

• WordPress 6.9 launched live on stage. By the end of the keynote, over 700,000 sites had already been updated. 

Tip: Learn more about the most exciting WordPress 6.9 features for website owners and developers.

AI takes center stage

This year’s AI panel featured James LaPage (Automattic), Felix Arntz (Google), and Jeff Paul (10up).

And here’s one of the central themes from the keynote: AI is becoming foundational to WordPress.

Matt Mullenweg announced that a dedicated AI team was formed earlier this year. In just six months, they shipped all four planned “building blocks”:

• Abilities API: Exposes the capabilities of plugins, themes, and WordPress core to AI agents in a standardized, machine-readable format.

• WP AI Client: An abstraction layer for communicating with any generative AI model — OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, or others — so developers can write prompts without locking into one provider.

• MCP Adapter: Bridges the Abilities API with AI providers through the Model Context Protocol, letting AI assistants understand and act within WordPress.

• AI Experiments plugin: Now live on the WordPress plugin repository.

Besides, the keynote featured a demo of Telex, a tool that generates Gutenberg blocks from natural language. 

During the keynote, Mullenweg showed how Nick Hamze used it to build a Lego price calculator and Google Calendar integration — without writing any code.

All these building blocks set the stage for what the AI panel previewed for 7.0: a Workflows API for stringing abilities together, collaborative editing with AI assistance, and the WP AI Client moving into core. 

AI features aren’t visible in the interface yet, but WordPress is now intelligible to AI systems — and the groundwork is laid for what comes next.

Tip: WordPress.com users can also explore our AI website builder, which helps you create, design, customize, and launch your site much faster and more easily.

WordPress around the world

The keynote also highlighted the increasingly global nature of WordPress:

• 81 WordCamps — community-organized conferences for WordPress users and contributors — took place across 39 countries this year. Over 5,200 volunteers organized them, reaching more than 100,000 people in person. And there are still 16 more scheduled before year’s end.

• Learn.wordpress.org served over 1.5 million users, with average engagement time up 32% after WordCamp US 2025.

• Education programs are expanding, too. Campus Connect is bringing WordPress into universities — Stephanie Garita Johnson from Universidad Fidélitas in Costa Rica spoke about how students there now earn academic credit for contributing to open source.

• And in Nicaragua, Youth Day brought together 75 kids ages 8 to 20 to build their first WordPress sites — with teenagers teaching teenagers.

Ecosystem and infrastructure updates

WordPress is also getting faster to ship, easier to test, and safer to update. 

This year’s improvements focused on reducing friction for plugin developers and making it easier to spin up new sites and migrate existing ones:

• Plugin reviews now take under 7 days thanks to AI-assisted review processes. The team is also handling about 100 more submissions per week than last year.

• A new 24-hour safety window for auto-updates gives developers time to catch issues from early adopters before updates roll out widely.

• WordPress Playground hit 1.4 million users from 227 countries this year. It now includes a file browser, a visual gallery of blueprints, and a stable CLI.

Q&A session

The community Q&A touched on several topics:

On domains and owning your online presence

Mullenweg emphasized that a domain is “your real estate on the web” — the thing that truly belongs to you. He encouraged everyone to get their own domain, even buying one for kids at birth. Without one, “you’re kind of like a digital sharecropper.”

On the “agentic web” and AI

As AI tools start browsing and acting on websites, Mullenweg shared ideas about serving markdown versions of pages for easier AI consumption and embedding micropayments for content attribution.

On open social platforms

He pointed to Bluesky as a positive example — where you can use your own domain as your username — and noted that X has improved its handling of external links.

Explore WordPress 6.9 on WordPress.com

This year’s State of the Word made one thing clear: WordPress is evolving fast — with AI foundations in place, a growing global community, and tools that make building and collaborating easier than ever.

WordPress 6.9 is also live on WordPress.com. Explore the new features in our detailed posts:

• What’s new in WordPress 6.9 for bloggers, creators, and site owners
• What’s new in WordPress 6.9 for developers

And if you missed the livestream, the full recording is available above.

 [#item_full_content]