At PressConf 2026, Anthony Ferrara asked everyone in the room under 35 to raise their hand. This was a room full of WordPress professionals: founders, engineers, agency owners, product people. About six hands went up.
I was one of them.
Anthony is the Principal of Oxy, a design agency whose clients include Y Combinator, Sequoia Capital, LinkedIn, and Walmart. He’s young himself, which is part of why the moment landed.
A few minutes earlier he’d said something that stuck with me: almost nobody he talks to cares about WordPress.
Now, his clients skew toward startups and Silicon Valley chic, so you could call that a biased sample. But then again, those are exactly the kinds of companies you’d want building on WordPress and betting their futures on it. And they aren’t.
The question is why? And I think the answer is more foundational than what most people think.
What’s an MTP?
The framing I keep coming back to is Salim Ismail’s idea of a Massive Transformative Purpose, or MTP. Ismail introduced it in Exponential Organizations, and he outlines it in detail in his essay on Massive Transformative Purpose.
An MTP isn’t a mission statement. It’s a highly aspirational tagline aimed at a global problem, big enough that it sounds slightly unreasonable. Think TED’s “ideas worth spreading,” Google’s “organize the world’s information,” or SpaceX’s “make humanity multiplanetary”.
Ismail credits a good MTP with three superpowers:
- Focus that drives exponential growth: It forces you to break old models. When Chris Anderson set out to take TED to 10,000 events, that would have sounded insane as a five-year plan. The MTP made it thinkable.
- Gravity that attracts talent and builds community: “Make humanity multiplanetary” pulls in committed staff, donors, and public support in a way a revenue target never could. It also depoliticizes: people align around the purpose instead of fighting over turf.
- Agility and a learning culture: Past a certain point, everyone stops asking “what’s my job?” and starts asking “what can I do to help achieve the MTP?”
WordPress had a great MTP before the term existed
Here’s the thing. WordPress already did this, long before anyone called it an MTP.
“Democratize publishing.”
Two words. Massive, transformative, and purposeful. It’s a big part of why WordPress won.
Run it through Ismail’s checklist for what a real MTP should be, and it hits nearly every mark:
- Emotional: “Democratize publishing” reaches hearts and minds. It generated real passion, the kind that made people contribute for free for years.
- Credible: Anyone who used WordPress could see it actually lowering the barrier to getting online. The purpose matched the product.
- Simple: Two words, no glossary required.
- Bigger than a mission statement: It wasn’t about the software. It was about the world the software was trying to create.
- Guides people, inside and out: Core contributors and the wider community both knew which direction counted as “forward.”
- Transformative, with purpose: It genuinely changed who got to publish on the web.
The mission got accomplished
So what happened?
The uncomfortable answer is that WordPress won. Publishing is democratized. Anyone with a phone can start a blog, a store, or a newsletter in an afternoon. The war the original MTP declared is basically over, and WordPress won it.
The problem with an accomplished mission is that it stops pulling you forward. WordPress still powers about a third of the web, but that share has stopped climbing and started to slip. When I dug into the market share numbers, WordPress sat at 33% of measurable sites in 2026, down from a 36% peak.
What’s left often feels like a project defending its turf rather than chasing a new frontier: slower product movement, a more defensive posture, and a lot of energy spent on internal governance fights instead of a shared goal.
I’ve written before about how WordPress companies need to stop defining themselves by the platform and start defining themselves by the problems they solve. The same logic applies to the ecosystem as a whole. Without a forward-looking purpose, you coast. And coasting, in a market that AI is reshaping every quarter, is how you slowly become irrelevant.
No MTP, no talent gravity
Ismail’s second superpower was that an MTP attracts top talent. The reverse is also true: no MTP, no gravity. The best young builders chase mission at least as hard as they chase money, and right now WordPress doesn’t offer them one.
It offers a mature platform, a huge install base, and a fulfilled purpose. That’s a fine place to run a business. It is not a place that fires up a 24-year-old deciding where to point the next decade of their life.
You could see the result in that room at PressConf. An aging contributor base. A generational cliff. A movement that changed the web, now struggling to recruit the people who will carry it forward. That’s the concrete cost of a purpose vacuum, and it compounds every year.
What a new MTP could look like
The core idea is this: the tools have changed, so the ambition can get bigger.
AI lets a small team do what used to take a large one. That’s exactly the condition under which a new, larger purpose becomes thinkable. Here’s me thinking out loud:
WordPress as the open data and action layer for the agentic web
As AI agents start reading, writing, and transacting across the web on our behalf, something has to be the open, human-owned substrate they operate on.
Why not the platform that already runs a third of it? Noel Tock has sketched part of this in “The 5 Levels of Agentic WordPress”.
James LePage, former Head of AI at Automattic, goes further in “The future of the web: what this means for WordPress”. His argument is that WordPress is uniquely positioned to provide the capabilities for creators and small business to participate in the agentic web by running their own agent-ready site that they control. Just as WordPress democratized publishing, it could democratize agent access: giving the whole long tail of the web the same capabilities that today only enterprises can afford to build, while keeping the principle that your content and your site stay yours.
I’ve spent real time on the practical edge of this myself. The pieces are already being built. What’s missing is the purpose that ties them together.
Keeping the web sovereign and human-owned
As machines take over more of publishing and consumption, the open web is worth defending on principle. WordPress could be the place that keeps the web something people own rather than something rented from a handful of platforms.
The obvious objection
There’s a fair pushback here: WordPress is an open-source project. It can’t just choose an MTP.
But here’s the thing. MTPs aren’t decreed, they’re rallied around. Someone names the thing, makes the case, and enough people decide it’s worth building toward that it becomes real.
No one is going to hand WordPress a new purpose. Someone has to propose one and start the argument.
So what MTP would make you want to dedicate the next 10 years of your life to WordPress?