WordPress is finally ready for 2026

Priscilla was sitting on the couch with her phone. She wanted to update a small piece of text on her own website. Something about a new sound-bowl session, the date, the place, a couple of lines of explanation. Five minutes of work, in theory.

Twenty minutes later she put the phone down. She had given up.

She runs WordPress on the Kadence theme. A clean stack, nothing wrong with it. On a laptop, it's all workable. On a phone, it falls apart. Gutenberg on mobile is an endless back-and-forth between blocks too small to tap, a toolbar that drops on top of your text, and a save button hidden inside a hamburger menu inside another hamburger menu. For someone with dyslexia and dyscalculia, this is not a "just push through" situation. It costs something real. Focus, patience, the trust that you won't accidentally break the whole page.

She is creative, sharp, musical. And her own website had become locked off to her.

This isn't a story about Priscilla. It isn't an anecdote crafted to illustrate what a product can fix. It is just what happened, and it stayed with me.

WordPress in 2026

WordPress runs about 43% of the web. It is mature, broadly supported, and in many ways extremely capable. But the way you put content on it still mostly feels like 2016. A desktop environment, with a mouse, in a browser tab you keep open next to your code editor.

The rest of software has gone somewhere else in ten years. People talk to their phones. People stopped typing everything out, they dictate. The friction of saying something to an interface is essentially gone, while the friction of clicking something in a block editor on a 6-inch screen has only gotten worse.

For the people I build for, yoga teachers, sound-bowl therapists, small business owners with a one-page site and no technical background, this is the difference between "I'll just put it up" and "I'll ask my nephew to look at it next weekend." Between autonomy and dependence.

That difference is bigger than a UX issue. It decides whether WordPress still belongs to them.

What we made of it

SailWP started as a clean theme (small, fast, GPL, with everything baked in that would normally take eight plugins). But the real shift is in the Co-pilot.

You open your site, you tap a small boat in the corner, and you talk. "Add a section about Sunday's evening session. Keep the tone soft. Drop the photo underneath." Or you type, if you prefer. Or you record a twenty-second voice note while you're on the tram.

In the background, the work that would otherwise take an hour of clicking happens. The co-pilot reads your page, understands your theme, and proposes something. You see a preview. You accept, or you ask for one round of tweaks. Done.

It works on your phone the way it works on your laptop. Not as an afterthought, as a starting point. Priscilla was the first person I had in mind when we built the mobile experience. Not "also works on mobile." Built for mobile first.

That is not a feature you put in a changelog. That is a stance.

The quiet question

There is an uncomfortable question underneath all this. Why didn't WordPress core do this themselves?

The infrastructure is there. The user base is there. The problem is well known. Anyone who has ever tried to edit a WordPress page from a phone knows this.

I'm not going to make a tirade out of it. Mullenweg and the core team have their own priorities, their own politics, their own reasons why things go the way they do. I'm not building a critique, I'm building a product.

But when the stewards of the world's largest open content platform don't get around to it, someone else fills the gap. Sometimes that's a company with a marketing budget. Sometimes it's a Dutch guy in an attic who got annoyed when his ex couldn't update her own website from her phone.

One of those two options is healthier for the ecosystem.

So far

I don't know whether SailWP gets big. I do know that Priscilla, for the past few weeks, has been quietly tapping or speaking what she wants to change from her couch, and actually publishing it. It no longer takes her twenty minutes. It no longer takes her patience.

For me, that is enough to keep building. Not because it's a story that sounds good on LinkedIn. But because somewhere along the way I came to believe that a lot of the work we do for "audiences" is really work we do for one specific person we know, and the rest comes along for the ride.

WordPress is finally, in 2026, ready for the people who actually use it. Not because the core roadmap arranged it. Because we put it there ourselves.

If Mullenweg catches up later, good. Then I will have done my job.