Is This the WordPress Killer We've Been Waiting For?
By Dan Crask • Founder, Brand Shepherd
For decades, people have been predicting the end of WordPress. It hasn’t happened yet. But something was announced this past week that made me stop scrolling and actually pay attention.
WordPress turns twenty-four this year. It powers around 60% of all websites on the internet. That kind of market dominance is hard to argue with, and harder to displace. We’ve seen competitors come and go. Webflow. Wix. Squarespace. They’ve carved out niches, sure, but none of them have landed a real punch on WordPress’s jaw.
Brand Shepherd builds a lot of websites. We’re currently in the middle of some of the most complex projects we’ve ever taken on. And nearly all of them are WordPress. If it’s e-commerce, it’s Shopify. Everything else is WordPress. That’s not an accident; it’s just the reality of the market.
So when something comes along that genuinely makes me think “this could be different,” I think it’s worth talking about.
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Enter Cloudflare
The announcement came from Cloudflare, and that’s the first reason I perked up.
If you’re not familiar, Cloudflare is one of those companies that operates behind the scenes of the internet. They’re not flashy. They don’t run Super Bowl ads. But they are deeply embedded in how websites run, how they stay secure, and how they recover when things go wrong.
They are trusted. They are respected. And until very recently, they’ve stayed in their lane.
That changed when they announced a new content management system called EmDash.
EmDash is being positioned as a ground-up rebuild of what a CMS should look like, designed for the internet as it exists today, and built with AI and AI agents in mind from day one. Not bolted on. Not buried in a security update that only nerds like me read through. Built in.
The “who” matters here. This is not a venture-backed startup swinging for the fences and hoping to get acquired. This is a company with serious brand equity and serious technical credibility, saying, “We looked at the current state of WordPress and decided to rethink it.” That deserves attention.
The Plugin Problem Is Real
Cloudflare called it a crisis in their release notes, and they’re right.
Here’s the thing about WordPress: it’s incredibly flexible because of plugins. Think of them like apps on your phone. Need a contact form? Plugin. Need SEO tools? Plugin. Need to connect your site to your CRM? Plugin. Before long, you’ve got twenty, thirty, or more of them running on a single site. Brand Shepherd has inherited client websites with over thirty active plugins.
Every one of those plugins is a potential vulnerability. Many are free, and you get what you pay for. Even paid plugins require constant upkeep. That’s why we include a full year of maintenance with every website we launch.
It’s not a revenue grab; it’s a necessity. If a plugin goes stale and the site gets compromised, the client isn’t going to want a technical explanation. They’re going to want it fixed.
Brand Shepherd runs what I’d call a plugin-minimalist philosophy. We don’t add plugins without a strong, mission-critical rationale. It’s not the most popular position in this industry. Most agencies are happy to layer plugins on because it adds value to the maintenance contract. We take a different view. We’re responsible for what we put on a site, and we act like it.
Cloudflare named this problem directly. That kind of transparency is itself a signal worth reading.
The “When” Matters Too
Timing is everything, and the timing of this announcement is interesting.
WordPress recently added some AI features, but they were buried inside a security update and didn’t get much traction. The WordPress community skews toward people who are skeptical of AI, and that’s fine. Everyone gets to make their own call. But it does mean that WordPress’s response to the AI moment has been reactive at best.
Cloudflare is coming at this differently. EmDash was built using AI agents, with human oversight throughout the process. They’re not just adding AI features; they’ve integrated AI into the build itself. And they’re designing the system for a web where AI agents are increasingly part of how content gets created, published, and found.
Brand Shepherd applies the same thinking to our Vibe, Tribe, and Why framework. One of the outputs of that process is a brand experience guide, and we’ve been using these guides to train AI models to consistently produce on-brand content. There’s a direct connection between a well-defined brand and how AI represents that brand in the world. Cloudflare is seeing the same thread we’re seeing.
What I’m Planning to Do
EmDash could absolutely be nothing. There is no shortage of WordPress challengers who launched with promise and faded out. I’m an optimistic realist, and I’m keeping that hat on.
But here’s what I’m going to do: I’m going to build something with it.
Over on dancrask.com, I’ll be documenting the process as I work through EmDash on a real project. I want to see how far I can get without a human developer in the loop, using Claude Code for the back-end work and other AI tools for content. The project itself is the subject of another episode, but it will be connected to Brand Shepherd.
If you want to follow along, head over to dancrask.com. If you’d rather just keep an eye on the space, set a Google Alert for “EmDash CMS Cloudflare” and check in once in a while. Because I think this one might have legs.
The ingredients check out. Now we have to see what gets cooked.
