Web Inclusion – Tim Brocklehurst – Solutions Architecture Review – 2026
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In 2013, Web Inclusion – in partnership with designers Sutton Young – recommended migrating canarywharf.com to WordPress, proposing a Multisite architecture that would deliver two distinct digital properties from a single platform. The sites launched in 2014: One presenting Canary Wharf Group to the corporate world; the other presenting the estate as a living destination for the tens of thousands of people who work, eat, and spend their days there. In 2026, both sites are still on WordPress. This article examines what that means, what WordPress has been through in the intervening years, and why – surveying the full landscape of what has emerged to challenge it – the original recommendation was correct.
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A Decision That Has Outlasted Its Sceptics
Twelve years is a long time in digital. When canarywharf.com launched on WordPress Multisite in 2014, Instagram was three years old and had only recently been acquired by Facebook. Responsive design had been standard practice for barely two years. The dominant professional consensus still held that WordPress was a platform for personal publishing and small business websites – an opinion that serious enterprise web practitioners held with some confidence, and were not shy about expressing. The suggestion that a platform with those associations would be running a major corporate estate’s digital infrastructure in 2026 – through multiple redesigns, through the full maturation of mobile, through the upheavals of social media, through a global pandemic that forced every organisation to rely on its digital presence as never before – would have struck most of those practitioners as naively optimistic.
And yet here we are. Both sites have run on WordPress through all of it. Themes have been overhauled. The content architecture has evolved as the estate has evolved. Plugins have been added and retired as requirements have changed. The hosting infrastructure beneath the installation has migrated and scaled. But the platform has remained constant – not out of institutional inertia, but because each time the question of migration has arisen, the honest answer has been: Migrate to what, exactly, and for what gain?
That is not a trivial outcome. It is the outcome that good architectural thinking is supposed to produce: A foundation stable enough to absorb the full weight of change above it without requiring replacement beneath.
See the original migration case study here.
The Multisite Decision in Retrospect
Before examining what WordPress has survived, it is worth revisiting the specific architectural choice at the centre of this project – because the Multisite decision has proved, if anything, more prescient than the platform decision itself.
The brief in 2013 presented a challenge that most CMS platforms handle badly: Two distinct digital properties, serving audiences with fundamentally different needs and content rhythms, that needed to be managed by a single team from a single infrastructure without cross-contamination of editorial voice, visual identity, or administrative complexity. The corporate site – measured, authoritative, investor-facing. The living site – warm, immediate, updated daily with the texture of estate life. Same organisation, same content team, entirely different sites.
WordPress Multisite answered this challenge cleanly. Twelve years on, the structural logic has held. Both sites have been redesigned independently, on their own schedules, without one affecting the other. The content team has managed both from a single administrative environment. Security updates have been applied once and protected both properties. Infrastructure decisions – hosting, caching, CDN – have been made at the network level rather than duplicated. When the estate has evolved – new developments, new retail offerings, new events programmes – the content architecture has absorbed those changes without requiring platform-level intervention.
Compare this with the alternative: Two separately managed platforms, each with its own hosting contract, its own update cycle, its own agency relationship, its own security posture. The cumulative operational cost of that model over twelve years – in hosting, in maintenance, in the inevitable divergence of technical debt between two separately managed systems – would have been substantial. The Multisite architecture was not merely a technical elegance. It was a commercial decision that has paid its dividend continuously.
What WordPress Has Been Through
To appreciate why WordPress’s continued relevance is remarkable, it is worth being specific about what the platform has had to survive. The challenges have been varied, sustained, and in some cases existential. It has navigated all of them.
The first sustained challenge was the professionalisation of mobile. The two Canary Wharf sites launched in 2014, at precisely the moment when the industry’s understanding of mobile had moved from “we should probably think about this” to “this is now the primary use case.” Responsive design was the baseline expectation, not the innovation. WordPress’s approach to this transition was characteristically distributed: The core platform did not mandate responsive design, but the professional theme development ecosystem enforced it as the obvious standard. Well-built WordPress themes in 2014 were responsive as a matter of course. The content team at Canary Wharf did not need to manage a separate mobile site or a separate mobile CMS. The platform moved with the web’s shift to mobile without requiring the organisations running on it to move separately.
The second challenge was the page builder era. Between approximately 2015 and 2020, drag-and-drop page building tools – Elementor, Divi, Beaver Builder, WPBakery among others – transformed WordPress’s accessibility at the lower end of the market. Millions of sites were built quickly, cheaply, and in many cases badly. The consequent proliferation of slow, plugin-heavy, architecturally chaotic WordPress installations gave genuine ammunition to critics who argued that the platform had lost coherence. Those criticisms were accurate when aimed at poorly built page builder sites. They were entirely irrelevant when aimed at well-engineered, custom-theme WordPress builds running on managed infrastructure – which is precisely what the Canary Wharf installation has always been. The page builder era expanded WordPress’s market enormously while having no bearing on the platform’s suitability for serious, professionally managed corporate sites.
The third challenge was the Gutenberg editor, introduced in WordPress 5.0 in December 2018. This was the most politically contentious change in WordPress’s history. The block-based editor replaced a familiar TinyMCE interface with a fundamentally different content model – one that treated every element of a page as a discrete, repositionable block. The developer community was divided, and loudly so. Early releases had genuine usability problems. Plugin incompatibilities caused disruption across many installations. A fork – ClassicPress – emerged from the dissatisfied. And yet: Several years on, Gutenberg has matured into a genuinely powerful and flexible content authoring environment. The block model has become the foundation for Full Site Editing, which allows entire site templates to be managed through the same interface as content – a development that considerably closes the gap between WordPress and the drag-and-drop SaaS builders that had been gaining ground at the simpler end of the market. The controversy was real; the long-term architectural direction it established has proved sound.
The fourth challenge came from the SaaS website builder market. Squarespace, Wix, and later Webflow collectively captured a very large proportion of the small-to-medium website market during the 2010s, offering polished templates, managed hosting, and zero technical overhead. These platforms are genuinely good for what they do: Providing an accessible, low-cost route to a professional web presence for organisations that do not need customisation beyond the cosmetic, complex content architecture, or genuine ownership of their digital infrastructure. For the Canary Wharf installation – a complex, multi-property, multi-content-type Multisite deployment representing a major commercial estate – they have never been a credible alternative. But their competitive pressure forced WordPress to take usability and editorial experience more seriously than it might otherwise have done, to the benefit of everyone running on the platform professionally.
The fifth, and in many respects most architecturally interesting, challenge came from headless and composable architectures. From approximately 2018 onwards, the most technically sophisticated corner of the industry argued persuasively that the traditional monolithic CMS – where content management and front-end rendering are coupled in the same system – was fundamentally obsolete. The future, the argument went, was headless: Content managed in a purpose-built repository (Contentful, Prismic, Sanity), delivered via API to a decoupled front end built in React, Next.js, or a comparable framework. For certain organisations – large media properties managing content across multiple channels and platforms, enterprise organisations with significant dedicated front-end engineering resource – this model has proved genuinely valuable. WordPress’s response was characteristically pragmatic: It shipped a fully functional REST API in 2016 and GraphQL support followed through the WPGraphQL plugin ecosystem shortly after. WordPress can be used as a headless content backend today with no architectural compromise. The organisations that need headless can have it. Those that do not need the additional engineering overhead – which is the great majority of corporate websites, including Canary Wharf’s – are not compelled to incur it.
The Competitive Landscape in 2026
Sitecore has evolved into an enterprise digital experience platform of genuine and increasing sophistication: Personalisation engines, analytics integration, omnichannel delivery, AI-assisted content management. Its capabilities at the top of the market are real. So is its cost: Licence fees, implementation costs, and dedicated platform expertise requirements have pushed Sitecore further and further upmarket, narrowing its addressable market to very large organisations with substantial dedicated digital infrastructure budgets. Canary Wharf Group has never needed what Sitecore now offers at the level it now costs.
Drupal has continued to serve the enterprise open-source market with distinction and discipline. Drupal 10 is a mature, principled, well-governed platform, and the right choice for organisations with genuinely complex content workflow requirements – granular multi-stage editorial approval, sophisticated access control architectures, highly bespoke content modelling. Its community is smaller than WordPress’s and its development overhead remains meaningfully higher. For the organisations that need exactly what Drupal offers, it remains excellent. The Canary Wharf Multisite requirement sits well within what WordPress handles cleanly; there has never been a compelling reason to incur Drupal’s additional complexity.
The headless-native CMS market has matured and found its appropriate constituency. Contentful, Sanity, and Prismic serve genuine needs for large, API-first digital products where content is a data resource consumed by multiple surfaces simultaneously. These are not general-purpose corporate CMS platforms. They are specialised infrastructure for specialised requirements.
WordPress, meanwhile, has grown from approximately 20 percent of the web in 2014 to more than 40 percent of all websites globally in the mid-2020s. That is not a platform maintaining relevance through inertia. That is the default infrastructure of the commercial web, arrived at through genuine competition on every significant dimension over more than a decade. WordPress VIP – the managed enterprise hosting platform – now serves a roster of organisations that includes major media brands, global charities, and public institutions that would have seemed implausible in 2013.
What the Canary Wharf Installation Has Proved
The two-site Canary Wharf WordPress Multisite installation has, through its twelve years of operation, demonstrated several things that were predictions rather than certainties when we proposed it.
It has proved that the content architecture is durable. The content structures built in 2014 – properties and development assets for the corporate site; venues, events, retail, dining, and transport for the living site – map cleanly onto how the organisation still thinks about and manages its digital content. Good content architecture does not require rebuilding with every redesign. It persists beneath theme changes and editorial overhauls because it reflects the genuine structure of the organisation’s information, not the conventions of a particular design era.
It has proved that the Multisite approach delivers its operational promise over time. The sites have been reskinned on different schedules, by different creative teams, with no interference between them. The content team has maintained a single set of credentials and a single administrative mental model across both properties. Infrastructure decisions have been made once and applied across the network. This is not a small efficiency at the margin; compounded across twelve years of operation, it represents a material reduction in the total cost of maintaining two distinct digital presences.
It has proved that the theme-content separation is practically valuable in the way we said it would be. Redesigns have been design exercises, not content migrations. The investment in content – in the editorial work of building and maintaining two rich, current, professionally managed sites – has been protected across every visual overhaul.
It has proved the developer pool argument. At no point has Canary Wharf been unable to find competent, affordable WordPress development resource. At no point has a change of agency created the knowledge-transfer crisis that bespoke or deeply proprietary systems routinely produce. The WordPress developer community has only grown, which means the sites become easier rather than harder to resource as time passes.
Why WordPress Is Now the Definitive Choice for Corporate Digital Infrastructure
The case for WordPress in 2026 is not the defensive case of 2013, where we were arguing against prevailing professional scepticism. It is an affirmative case, built on twelve years of evidence and a competitive landscape that has resolved decisively in WordPress’s favour.
WordPress is the most future-proof CMS available for corporate websites of complexity and ambition because it has earned that designation empirically. It has absorbed the mobile revolution, the page builder era, the Gutenberg upheaval, the SaaS challenger wave, and the headless architectural argument – and emerged from each of them with greater market share, a larger developer community, and a more capable platform than before. That is not luck, and it is not network effects operating in the absence of real quality. It is the consequence of an open-source architecture that distributes improvement across a global community rather than concentrating it in a product roadmap controlled by a single vendor with its own commercial priorities.
The proprietary enterprise CMS market of 2013 has either retreated upmarket into digital experience platform territory that most organisations cannot commercially justify, or it has narrowed to the point where the developer pool, community investment, and ecosystem depth that WordPress commands is simply unavailable. The bespoke CMS has largely disappeared as a serious option, quietly acknowledged as the maintenance liability and supplier-dependency trap it always was. The headless-native platforms serve genuine needs for specific organisations with specific architectures; they are not a general replacement for what WordPress does, and they impose an engineering overhead that the great majority of corporate digital operations cannot absorb.
WordPress, in 2026, sits at the centre of the market not because it has attempted to be everything to everyone, but because it has been the right things – extensible, affordable to resource, architecturally clean, governable at scale, genuinely independent of single-vendor risk – to the organisations that represent the core of the corporate digital market, with remarkable and compounding consistency.
A Final Word on Being Right for the Right Reasons
In 2013, when we recommended WordPress Multisite for Canary Wharf Group, the honest position was that we could not know with certainty that this would still be the correct platform in 2020, let alone 2026. What we could know was the reasoning: That open-source community momentum is more durable than proprietary vendor roadmaps; that architectural simplicity is more valuable over time than feature complexity; that a large and growing developer pool is more strategically important than platform sophistication at the margin; that future-proofing is not a feature of a system but a property of its architecture; and that a Multisite infrastructure serving two audiences from one platform would reduce operational complexity and cost in ways that would compound beneficially over years, not just quarters.
Those propositions have been tested across twelve years of digital history, against serious competition and genuine disruption, and they have held. The two Canary Wharf sites are still on WordPress not because the organisation has been slow to change, but because the platform has given them no reason to. The content is accessible and current. The editorial teams are effective and unencumbered. The developer ecosystem is abundant and competitively priced. The redesigns have been design exercises. The infrastructure has scaled beneath the sites without drama. That is precisely what good architectural thinking is supposed to produce.
We were right. Not by accident, and not by luck, but because the reasoning was sound and the platform has proved worthy of it. WordPress was the correct choice in 2013. It remains the correct choice in 2026. It has stood the test of time because it was built – from its architecture outward, and its community inward – to do exactly that.
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Tim Brocklehurst – Solutions Architect – Web Inclusion – 2026