My current conspiracy theory 🤪  🔗 **Source:** [My current conspiracy theory 🤪](https://twitter.com/DerekAshauer/status/2082846651119710256/?rw_tt_thread=True) My current conspiracy theory 🤪 WP is not declining for *real* sites. It’s being used less by shady people. Many moons ago I took a class on how to make money sites using SEO (I was in a low point - divorce - and desperate for new income ideas). They preached having your own shadow network of sites as the key to it all. Buy an expired domain with decent DR, recreate the site generally close to what it was from WayBackMachine, inject a few targeted links to your actual money sites. One person had thousands of these sites, all using WP because it was the easiest way to spin up. They would install various plugins (always the free version) and used a variety across their network. All this across tons of cheap web hosts and organized in massive spreadsheets so sites on the same host/IP never linked to one another to help it look more natural. Multiply this by the number of shady people doing stuff online - you get massively inflated WP usage. I think people genuinely underestimate the number of spam sites that use WP. This was even a shady technique used by massive legit companies! Conclusion: Those tactics no longer work as well + AI being an easier way to spin up fake sites these days, you get a “decline” in WP. It was never legitimately as big as we thought it was. This isn’t the whole story but I do genuinely think it’s part of it., My current conspiracy theory 🤪, Derek Ashauer, 01kz91yv9yv03qkj75h6y26zss.