1) Superior installability (and in recent releases, update-ability). This doesn't preclude others from making something better, but WP makes incredible ease of

1) Superior installability (and in recent releases, update-ability). This doesn't preclude others from making something better, but WP makes incredible ease of installation/deployment (including of themes, plugins, updates, etc.) "table stakes." That's a genuine "barrier to market entry" for any contender. IME, nothing else comes close to WP installability. There are some glitches around updates (esp. if themes and such have been customized), but updates are also increasingly smooth/automatic. 2) Momentum, inertia, market position, "path dependence," installed base, and community. Also not a show-stopper for those wishing to improve on WP technically, but a huge hurdle to cross for anyone wishing to encourage investment in alternatives. Large user bases create virtuous cycles of investment and improvement that fix previously broken things. Sure, it may not always be pretty, but WP now how has WYSIWYG editors, versioning, increasingly automated updates, ever improving admin features, and many other things that were hopeless in previous versions. 3) LCD. WP works on virtually all platforms, and is a credible lowest common denominator in terms of technology used (PHP, MySQL) and breadth of support. There have been some attempts to ramp up alternatives, but they often require one to use Ruby on Rails, Python and Django, or other less-LCD tech. 4) Chicken and egg problem. I have no doubt that at some point another CMS/publishing platform will arise to supersede WP. It's the nature of tech things. It's unlikely we'll all be using WP in 2025 or 2045. But as a developer who definitely wants a more elegant, extensible CMS platform, and who has the tech skills to jump languages and environments, I've never found a better alternative to invest in/build on. There are frameworks like Rails, Flask, Django, Meteor, etc. we might use for custom apps. But a built-out, reasonably-supported, rich CMS / web publishing environment? I haven't found an alternative I can credibly present to customers, co-developers, and designers as an up-and-coming, likable, very-likely-to-succeed platform we should build on. Linux over historical Unix, nginx over Apache, or Go over C or C++? Sure. There is no general-purpose X I could broadly recommend over WordPress.