Oops! We could not locate your form.
The new year is looming, which can only mean one thing. Another annual roundup post!
2025 has flown by in a blur! It feels like just a week ago that I wrote the last yearly roundup post, and yet so much has happened in digital and the web in that time.
So let’s dive in and look at some of the key stats, events and changes in 2025 (I’ll of course update if anything big happens between now and December 31st!)
Let’s start with WordPress, as that is why we’re here writing posts for you.
Thankfully there has been less drama this year (at WordPress at least, plenty in digital and tech in general). Instead, we’ve had the usual scheduled releases bringing improvements and new features to the platform, ensuring its continued position as a world-leading CMS.
In addition to these major version updates, the countless maintenance and security updates kept the platform stable and secure, along with the various betas and release candidates for each new version, to allow for community testing.
As you can see, the WordPress team have been as busy as ever:
WordPress market share has remained fairly consistent in 2025, with a 60.4% CMS market share (from 62.2% last year) and the CMS is behind 43.2% of all known websites (43.7% last year). It is still very much the market leader.
As of October 2025, there were 6.04 billion active internet users worldwide, up from 5.52 billion last year. That is 73.2% of the global population (up from 67.5%)!
The devices that those 6.04 billion users use to access the internet split out like this:
This year, the browser market share across devices looks like this:
Breaking browser market share down further, this is the split across the 6 most popular browser versions:
The search engine landscape is obviously dominated by Google, although they have experienced a small drop again this year.
It is believed that in 2025, 68.7% of the global population uses social media.
The breakdown of market share for the major platforms looks like this:
Based on active users, the list looks more like this:
According to Statista, global digital advertising spend is predicted to hit over $1.17tn in 2025, with TV & Video Advertising making up the largest contributor (over $357.40bn billion).
It is not surprising that the US is the largest generator of ad spend globally ($466.34bn). In the UK ad spend for 2025 is predicted to be $46 billion.
Here are the screen resolutions that were dominant in 2025.
In June 2025 the European Accessibility Act became law in the European Union. The Act, which came into being in June 2019, gave each EU member state three years to transpose it into their national legislation.
The Act builds on the existing EU legislation relating to accessibility and will hopefully deliver much needed consistency to the approach to digital accessibility across the EU member states. This included eCommerce websites, digital information and ticketing for transport services, and much more.
2025 may have started with wide-eyed optimism about generative AI, but by year’s end many companies, investors and experts are sounding more cautious.
According to recent analysis, generative AI appears to be slipping into what some describe as a “Trough of Disillusionment.” While there’s still optimism about long-term utility, concerns about accuracy, misuse, and business value are leading to more measured adoption.
That said, AI remains central to enterprise strategies. The 2025 McKinsey Tech Trends report lists AI-powered everything, from automation to robotics, supply-chain optimisation, content generation and more, among the top priorities for businesses this year.
At the end of 2025, a senior executive at Google argued that AI-powered search isn’t the end of traditional websites, but rather an evolution. He claimed that AI search formats will “expand online engagement” by surfacing content from across the web and driving clicks to publishers, meaning websites that adapt to AI-driven discovery could thrive.
Time will tell on this, but for now it seems that the general consensus among experienced search professionals is that doing what is has been ‘good SEO’ for the last few years, will also position you well to succeed in AI-assisted search.
2025 has already proven to be a turbulent year on the cyber-security front, with high-profile data breaches, zero-day exploits and supply-chain attacks hitting companies big and small.
Here are some of the headline events.
In mid-2025, researchers uncovered a zero-day exploit impacting self-managed Microsoft SharePoint servers. The attack compromised around 100 organisations, including government bodies, banks, healthcare providers and industrial firms. The breach demonstrated how even well-known, enterprise-grade systems are vulnerable if not properly patched.
In April 2025, M&S was the first retailer to be hit by a significant cyber-attack. Soon after, similar incidents were reported at Co-op and Harrods.
M&S
Co-op
As AI-driven systems proliferate, hackers are leveraging automation, mass-scale scraping, identity theft, and deepfake-enabled social engineering attacks. Cyber-crime experts have warned that AI is lowering the barrier for complex breaches, making even smaller businesses potential targets.
As generative-AI systems proliferate, so too do automated bots crawling the web for content. One major infrastructure provider, Cloudflare, says it blocked more than 416 billion AI bot requests targeting its customers’ content since July 1, 2025. This is part of a company-wide ‘“’content-independence’”’ push aimed at protecting publishers’ work from being scraped without consent.
This massive bot volume underscores how vulnerable online content is becoming, and signals a shift toward ‘content licensing’ or controlled data-access models.
In December 2025, a misconfigured update at Cloudflare triggered a major outage, knocking offline several major platforms including social networks, collaboration tools, eCommerce sites and more. This was their second major outage in the space of a month.
This incident spotlighted a fundamental risk. When internet infrastructure is concentrated among a few providers, even minor technical errors can have global impact. For businesses, it underscores the value of contingency planning, multi-CDN/multi-region infrastructure, and robust backup/redundancy strategies.
If there’s one line that sums up 2025’s digital environment, it’s that adaptability and resilience are as important as innovation.
If you’d like to talk through how these trends affect your website or online strategy, or get help building a site that’s designed for performance, resilience and future-readiness, then get in touch.
