FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
August 18, 2026 — The WP Open Community Collective (The WPOCC) released their findings from the State of the Community 2026 survey.
The WPOCC’s State of the Community Report has been published in full, along with the aggregate data behind every number and quote in the survey. They have also published the survey instrument, the survey methodology, and a written account of the survey limitations.
Read the report: https://thewpocc.org/state-of-the-community/
“We ran this survey in order to understand how the WordPress community was feeling without guessing or assuming. We did not run it to prove a point or validate our own experiences. (For what it is worth, I didn’t even take the survey.) Our findings are based exclusively on the data, and we have published that data so that anyone who disagrees with our reading of it can check.””
— Sé Reed – CEO, The WP Open Community Collective
The 11 Findings
When analyzing the data, the WPOCC identified 11 findings that were significant to understanding community sentiment and perspective. Those 11 findings are explored in depth in the report:
- 81.7% of respondents are positive about open source. 32.7% say the same about WordPress.
- 77.3% of respondents feel differently toward WordPress than they did two years ago. 95.5% of them feel worse.
- Three in four respondents are negative or unsure about WordPress’s future (but they haven’t all left yet)
- Governance and leadership is the problem the community reports most
- Participation is contracting, and the people stepping back have been in the community more than a decade
- Half the people doing community work don’t consider themselves contributors
- Belonging matters more than money to almost everyone (including the people being paid to participate)
- The community uses AI every day. The community does not want AI in WordPress.
- On AI and money, business owners are the only group that expects to win
- A third of respondents who have attended a WordPress event no longer do — and they have pulled back from everything else too
- 90% of respondents agree on the importance of security, web standards, open source values, and the WordPress software itself
“The results of the survey are difficult in places, and our findings reflect that. But we have published the responses as they were given, and we believe the results to be a reasonably accurate representation of the sentiment of the core WordPress community.”
— Sé Reed – CEO, The WP Open Community Collective
All of the data is published
The State of the Community Survey is the first independent, anonymous survey measuring the sentiment, experience, and values of the people who work with, build on, contribute to, or care about the WordPress open source project.
The survey was fielded from May 27 through July 17, 2026, with a total of 431 respondents answering 231 questions.
Survey details, such as methodology and limitations and the aggregate data is available on the WPOCC’s public GitHub.
Every number in the report can be checked against the results, by anyone.
findings-figures.csvlists every figure the report cites, the sentence or chart it appears in, and the file and lookup keys needed to verify it.- The full significance register — all 499 statistically significant subgroup differences we found across 1,374 tests.
- Per-question tallies for every closed question and option, keyed to the published survey instrument.
- Every 1–5 item broken out by every segment — 5,640 rows — so you can rebuild any comparison in the report, or build one we did not make.
- Every derived variable we used, published separately, so that figures computed on a derived base are checkable.
- Every free-written response from the 280 respondents who granted permission, is published verbatim (including some criticizing the survey itself).
Aggregate data is released under CC BY 4.0. Commercial reuse is fine; attribution is required. The report text is CC BY-NC 4.0.
What this means for The WPOCC
Our primary takeaway is encapsulated in Finding 11: A community that had genuinely given up would not still be at 90% agreement on what is most important for the project.
Being at WordCamp US this year, I am seeing a lot of passion for the community and the ecosystem and a lot of concern around the future of WordPress and software development broadly. This echoes what we see in the survey results. I am super excited to share these community insights because it gives the WPOCC and the WordPress community a foundation to grow on.
– Chris Reynolds – Interim president, The WP Open Community Collective
We plan to run the State of the Community Survey annually with a consistent instrument and methodology, so that next year’s report can show changes and not just a snapshot.
Several of the changes already scheduled came from respondents who used their free-written responses to share where the instrument fell short of expectations. The survey instrument is public and open to comment for anyone who wants to help us do improve in the future.
Thank you to the 431 people who gave us twenty minutes of their time (and in many cases a great deal more), and trusted us with your honest responses. We read every single comment, and our reflection on these results will continue.
Read the report: https://thewpocc.org/state-of-the-community/
The WP Open Community Collective is a member-based organization supporting open source contributors and strengthening the communities and ecosystems around them. The WPOCC and the State of the Community Survey are not affiliated with the WordPress Foundation or the WordPress open source project. For more information, visit thewpcommunitycollective.com.
Citation: The WP Open Community Collective (2026). State of the Community 2026. https://thewpocc.org/state-of-the-community-2026/