For twenty years, WordPress empowered millions of people to build websites. It lowered the barrier, democratized publishing, and quietly created an entire economy of designers, developers, freelancers, and agencies who knew how to bend it to their will. It wasn’t glamorous work most of the time, but it was dependable. If you knew your way around themes, plugins, and a bit of CSS, you could make a living. Now it’s doing something far more interesting—and far more uncomfortable. It’s making most of that work optional. The $5,000 Website Is Already Dead Let’s not pretend this is coming. It’s already here. The classic small business website—the five-page build with a homepage, services, about, contact, and maybe a blog—used to be the bread and butter of the WordPress economy. It justified a few thousand dollars because it required coordination, setup, design decisions, content entry, and just enough technical friction to make it inaccessible to most clients. That friction is gone!…