If you’ve built a website on WordPress anytime after 2018, you’ve used Gutenberg whether you realized it or not. It’s the block-based editor that replaced the old “Classic Editor” text box, and it quietly became one of the most consequential redesigns in the platform’s twenty-year history. This post digs into where Gutenberg came from, when it actually launched, how widely it’s used today, the business empire behind it, and whether or when it might eventually be retired.
Founded: Why It’s Named After a 15th-Century Printer
Gutenberg wasn’t built by a startup or a private company; it’s an open-source project developed under the WordPress umbrella, spearheaded by Automatics (the company co-founded by WordPress creator Matt Mullenweg) working alongside thousands of volunteer contributors from the global WordPress community.
The project takes its name from Johannes Gutenberg, the inventor of the movable-type printing press in the 15th century. The metaphor is deliberate: just as Gutenberg’s press democratized the production of books and took publishing out of the hands of a small scribal elite, the WordPress team wanted their new editor to democratize web publishing, letting anyone build rich, structured pages without touching code.
The person most closely associated with actually leading the project’s design and engineering is Matías Ventura, an Automattic-employed developer who became Gutenberg’s project lead and, more recently, was named release lead for WordPress 7.0 as the collaboration features come together. Matt Mullenweg set the strategic direction and pushed hard for its adoption, but Ventura and a rotating cast of core contributors did the day-to-day building.
Start: From Feature Plugin to WordPress Core
Gutenberg didn’t arrive out of nowhere. It began life around 2017 as a standalone “feature plugin” that curious users could install to test the new block-based editing experience while the Classic Editor remained the default for everyone else.
The real turning point came on December 6, 2018, when Gutenberg was merged into WordPress core as part of the WordPress 5.0 release. Overnight, every new WordPress installation shipped with the block editor as the default writing experience, replacing the single large text field that had defined WordPress editing since its 2003 founding.
The rollout was, by most accounts, rocky. Smashing Magazine ran a widely-read “postmortem” on the launch, and plenty of agencies (probably some familiar to you) fielded angry client calls in the weeks after 5.0 shipped. Compatibility issues with popular plugins, a steep learning curve, and accessibility complaints led WordPress to release the Classic Editor plugin as an official escape hatch originally promised support “until 2024, or as long as is necessary.” That plugin is still actively maintained today, which tells you something about how long transitions like this really take in a CMS running hundreds of millions of sites.
Stats: How Big Is Gutenberg Today?
Here’s where the scale of this project becomes obvious. As of 2026:
WordPress itself now powers roughly 43.5% of all websites globally and about 62.8% of the identifiable CMS market, with an estimated 835 million+ active WordPress sites worldwide still growing at around 1.2% year-over-year.
Within that massive footprint, Gutenberg’s own adoption numbers look like this: roughly 72% of WordPress users are actively using the block editor rather than falling back to Classic Editor or a third-party builder. Block-based themes, specifically the newer, more advanced layer of Gutenberg that lets you edit an entire site’s design in blocks (called “Full Site Editing”) are used on about 28% of sites, up sharply from just 14% in 2024. There are now over 1,200 block-based themes listed in the official WordPress.org directory.
Interestingly, a large chunk of the market around 47% of WordPress sites still runs third-party page builders like Elementor or Divi instead of native Gutenberg. That’s a useful reality check: Gutenberg dominates the “default” experience, but it hasn’t fully displaced the page-builder ecosystem, especially among agencies and freelancers who built workflows around those tools long before 2018 (something you’ll recognize from your own WordPress work).
Net Worth: The Business Behind the Block Editor
Gutenberg itself isn’t a company and doesn’t have a “net worth” in the traditional sense; it’s free, open-source software licensed under the GPL. But it sits at the center of a genuinely large commercial ecosystem, and that’s worth putting numbers on.
Automattic, the company most responsible for funding Gutenberg’s development (through WordPress.com, Jetpack, and WooCommerce revenue), was founded by Matt Mullenweg in 2005 and has since raised roughly $900 million–$1 billion across multiple funding rounds. Its most recent valuation sits at approximately $7.5 billion (2025 figures), with estimated annual recurring revenue around $710 million. Mullenweg himself has an estimated personal net worth in the neighborhood of $400 million and notably, he turned down a $200 million acquisition offer for Automattic back in 2009, a decision that looks pretty good in hindsight given where the company sits now.
Zoom out further and the numbers get bigger still: the broader WordPress ecosystem hosting companies, plugin and theme marketplaces, page builders, agencies like the kind you run is frequently estimated to generate multiple billions of dollars a year in economic activity, almost entirely riding on top of software that costs nothing to download. Gutenberg, by making WordPress more competitive against closed-platform builders like Wix and Squarespace, is widely credited by WordPress leadership as a key piece of protecting that ecosystem’s long-term relevance.
End: Has Gutenberg’s Story Actually Finished?
Short answer: no and it’s not really designed to. Gutenberg was always planned as a multi-phase project, and it’s currently only three-quarters of the way through its own roadmap:
Phase 1 Easier Editing (the block editor itself) shipped with WordPress 5.0 in 2018 and is considered complete, though it still receives ongoing refinements.
Phase 2 Customization brought Full Site Editing, block patterns, the block directory, and block-based themes, culminating in the Site Editor’s launch with WordPress 6.3.
Phase 3 Collaboration is the current focus as of 2026: real-time co-authoring, more intuitive multi-user workflows, and improved publishing tools. This is the work Matías Ventura is now leading into WordPress 7.0, expected to also bring better media handling and expanded block functionality through the rest of 2026.
Phase 4 Multilingual is the final planned phase, aiming to build native multilingual support directly into WordPress core rather than relying entirely on plugins like WPML or Polylang, a huge deal for anyone running international sites (including, potentially, the kind of client work coming out of your agency).
So rather than “ending,” Gutenberg is really in the middle of becoming something bigger than an editor, an entire site-building and now collaboration framework baked into WordPress core. The one thing that has been quietly winding down is the need for the Classic Editor fallback: usage keeps shrinking every year as more themes, plugins, and agencies build Gutenberg-native by default.
Final Thoughts
Gutenberg’s journey from a controversial 2018 launch that frustrated plenty of long-time WordPress users, to a block-based system now running on hundreds of millions of sites and backed by a multi-billion-dollar company is a solid case study in how open-source software actually evolves: messily, incrementally, and usually longer than anyone originally planned. With Phase 3 (Collaboration) rolling out through WordPress 7.0 and Phase 4 (Multilingual) still ahead, the Gutenberg story is far from over. If anything, 2026 might just be the point where it stops being “the new editor” and becomes simply what WordPress is.
