WordPress consultants exist because WordPress doesn't work
If WordPress really let anyone build a website, there wouldn't be 30,000 agencies worldwide doing it for them. The same pattern repeats across the entire mid-tier SaaS landscape, and AI is about to expose it.
There are an estimated 30,000 WordPress agencies worldwide. Tens of thousands more freelancers. An entire economy of theme developers, plugin authors, hosting specialists, SEO consultants, and migration experts.
All of them exist because of a product whose entire pitch is that anyone can build a website.
Think about that for a moment. If WordPress actually delivered on its promise, those 30,000 agencies would not exist. The freelancers would be doing something else. The plugin ecosystem — which exists largely to patch the gaps between what WordPress does out of the box and what people actually need — would be a fraction of its current size.
This is not a WordPress problem. It is a pattern that repeats across the entire mid-tier SaaS landscape. And AI is about to expose it.
The new priesthood
The no-code and low-code revolution was supposed to democratise technology. Give everyone the tools, and they will build what they need. No developers required.
What actually happened was the creation of a new priesthood. WordPress promised anyone could build a website, but created a global industry of people who build WordPress websites for other people. Salesforce promised you could manage your customer relationships, but spawned an entire career path of Salesforce administrators and consultants. HubSpot promised all-in-one marketing, then built a partner ecosystem to configure it. Shopify promised you could start selling today, then launched Shopify Experts because most people could not.
The pattern is always the same. The platform markets itself as self-service. The reality is that a non-technical user signs up, gets overwhelmed by configuration options, plugin choices, theme conflicts, and terminology they did not expect to learn, and then hires someone to sort it out.
The promise was democratisation. The reality was a new class of intermediary.
Why generic platforms always create this problem
It is not that these platforms are badly built. Most of them are technically impressive. The problem is structural.
A generic platform has to serve everyone. A wedding photographer and an accounting firm and a restaurant and a SaaS startup all need "a website," but they need fundamentally different things. So the platform has to be infinitely flexible, which means infinitely configurable, which means the user is handed a blank canvas and a 400-page manual and told to crack on.
WordPress has over 59,000 plugins. That is not a feature. That is an admission that the core product does not do what most people need it to do. Every plugin is a patch over a gap. Every theme is an attempt to impose opinion on a system that deliberately has none.
The result is that the user — the person who was supposed to be empowered — spends their time managing the platform instead of running their business. They are updating plugins, troubleshooting conflicts, fighting with page builders, optimising performance that should not need optimising, and reading forum posts about problems that should not exist.
A small business owner does not want a CMS. They want a website that showcases their work, helps people find them, and makes it easy to get in touch. The CMS was always an intermediary layer between that intent and that outcome, and it was tolerated because the alternative — hiring a developer to build something bespoke — was too expensive and too slow.
AI changes that equation
This is where it gets interesting, and where I think a lot of SaaS companies have not yet reckoned with what is coming.
AI does not build you a CMS. It collapses the distance between intent and outcome. A non-technical user can now describe what they want — "I need a website that shows my portfolio, has a booking form, and ranks well in my local area" — and get something functional in hours, not weeks. No plugins. No theme conflicts. No configuration.
The mid-tier platform existed because bespoke was too expensive. If AI makes bespoke fast and cheap, the platform loses its reason to exist.
I am not talking about the infrastructure-level SaaS companies. Stripe is not going anywhere. AWS is not going anywhere. The platforms that handle genuine operational complexity — payment processing, regulatory compliance, security at scale — have moats that AI cannot shortcut. You could theoretically build your own payment gateway. Nobody sane would.
But the platforms whose entire value proposition was "we made it easy to do X"? If AI can make X easy without the platform, the platform is in trouble. And the consultant ecosystem built on top of those platforms is in even more trouble.
The real problem is data
Here is what I think most people miss when they talk about this shift. The discussion is usually framed as "AI versus SaaS." But the deeper issue is about data.
Generic platforms encourage unstructured, siloed data. Your website content lives in your CMS. Your customer data lives in your CRM. Your marketing data lives in your email tool. Your bookings live in your booking system. Your testimonials are screenshots on a page somewhere. None of it is connected. None of it talks to anything else.
This is the underutilisation problem I see in almost every client engagement. Businesses are sitting on data that gets used exactly once for exactly one purpose. A booking is just a booking — it never becomes content on the website. A testimonial is just a quote on a page — it never informs which services to promote. A five-star review on Google never flows to the website automatically. Every piece of data is entered manually, in multiple places, and maintained separately.
The platforms that survive the AI shift will not be the ones that are most configurable. They will be the ones that treat your data as a structured, connected, single source of truth — where one entry powers multiple outputs. Your booking data informs your website content. Your testimonials flow automatically. Your service information is entered once and rendered wherever it is needed.
The platform is not the website. The website is one output. The platform is the structured data underneath it.
What this means if you are choosing a platform
If you are a business owner evaluating your technology stack right now, I would suggest asking a different question than "which platform should I use?"
Ask instead: where does my data live, and how many times am I entering the same information?
If you are maintaining your services in three different places, manually copying testimonials from Google to your website, and your booking system knows nothing about your marketing, you have a data problem. No amount of plugins or integrations will fix a fundamentally fragmented data model.
The businesses that will benefit most from AI are the ones whose data is structured and accessible. If your business information is scattered across disconnected platforms, AI cannot help you leverage it. If it is structured and connected, AI can reason over it, generate content from it, surface insights, and automate the tedious work of keeping everything consistent.
The honest position
I have spent 15 years building software and working as a consultant. I have been the person hired to make "self-service" platforms work for clients who were supposed to be able to do it themselves. I understand why those platforms exist, and I understand the real value they provide.
But I also think the industry needs to be honest about what is happening. The mid-tier platform model — generic, infinitely configurable, surrounded by a consultant ecosystem — is under genuine threat. Not because AI will replace all software, but because AI removes the need for the intermediary layer that these platforms represent.
The platforms that will thrive are the ones that are opinionated, structured, and treat your data as the product rather than your website. The ones that will struggle are the ones still selling you a blank canvas and a 400-page manual, regardless of how good their page builder has become.
And if there are 30,000 agencies whose entire business model depends on a product being too complicated for its intended users? That is a problem that AI is very good at solving.
Frequently asked questions
Does this mean I should avoid WordPress entirely?
Not necessarily. WordPress powers around 40% of the web and has a massive ecosystem. For certain use cases — particularly content-heavy sites with dedicated technical teams — it remains a viable choice. The issue is when WordPress is sold as a simple solution for non-technical users. If you are a small business owner who does not want to manage plugins, themes, and hosting, you should be honest about whether you will end up hiring someone to do that anyway, and factor that cost into your decision.
Are all SaaS platforms at risk from AI?
No. Infrastructure-level platforms with genuine operational complexity — payment processing, cloud hosting, security, compliance — have moats that AI cannot replicate. The platforms most at risk are the ones in the middle: generic, configurable tools whose primary value was making something possible that was previously too expensive to build bespoke. AI is making bespoke fast and cheap, which removes the need for that intermediary layer.
What should I look for in a platform instead?
Look for platforms that are opinionated about your data model rather than infinitely flexible. Ask where your data lives and whether it is connected. A good platform should let you enter information once and have it appear wherever it is needed — your website, your marketing, your social media, your reporting. If you are manually copying the same information between systems, you have a data architecture problem that no plugin marketplace can solve.
Will AI replace the consultant ecosystem too?
Partially. AI is already capable of handling much of what WordPress consultants do: configuring themes, writing content, optimising performance, troubleshooting plugin conflicts. The consultants who survive will be the ones who offer strategic value — understanding the business problem, structuring data correctly, making technology decisions that align with business goals — rather than configuration labour. The same shift applies to Salesforce admins, HubSpot partners, and every other platform-specific consultant role.