WordCamp Stats: Comparing WCUS and WCEU

I got curious about something I kept hearing anecdotally at recent WordCamps: that WordCamp US attendance feels smaller every year, while WordCamp Europe still feels like the big one. So I pulled the numbers straight from each event’s public attendees page and charted them out.

Here’s WCUS since 2015: 2,656 → 1,928 → 1,699 → 1,462 → 1,367. That’s a steady decline every single year before the pandemic ever happened, roughly a 48% drop from 2015 to 2019. So this isn’t a new problem.

2020 has no public data (WCUS went virtual and never published a ticketed roster), and 2021’s 2,379 was a free, low-friction online event, so it’s not comparable to in-person years.

The real story is what happened once WCUS came back in person:

• 2022: 794 — the lowest in-person count on record at that point
• 2023: 1,449 — a real rebound, back near 2018 levels
• 2024: 1,339 — a slight step back
• 2025: 884 — down 34% in a single year
• 2026 (Phoenix): 187 so far, with registration still open

2024 is worth calling out specifically. That’s the year Matt Mullenweg used the WCUS keynote stage to launch into the fight with WP Engine — I covered the blow-by-blow in my WP Drama Log. Attendance that year was already down from 2023’s rebound, and the year after, it fell off a cliff. I don’t think that’s a coincidence. A public war within the community, arbitration, plugin lockouts, ecosystem trust getting torched — that’s exactly the kind of thing that makes people quietly skip a $250+ flight-and-hotel conference next year.

Now compare that to WordCamp Europe over the same stretch:

WCEU tells a completely different story. It grew from 913 in 2014 to a peak of 3,496 in 2017, dipped for a couple of years, then came back post-pandemic and has held in a tight 2,000–2,200 band from 2022 through 2024. 2025 dipped to 1,497 — WCEU wasn’t immune to whatever headwinds hit the whole community that year either — but 2026’s final count of 1,850 shows it recovering. It never came close to the kind of single-year collapse WCUS just had.

A few things stand out when you put these side by side:

1. WCUS’s decline is not new. It was already losing nearly half its attendance before 2020. The pandemic didn’t start this trend, it just paused the counting.
2. WCEU has been the more resilient event for years now, even though it started from a much smaller base a decade ago. It’s now consistently pulling more people than WCUS did even in WCUS’s better recent years.
3. The 2024-to-2025 WCUS crash lines up almost exactly with the fallout from the WP Engine drama. WCEU dipped that same year too, but nowhere near as hard, and it bounced back the following year. WCUS did not.
4. 2026 is the one to watch. Phoenix is a new host city for WCUS, registration is still open, and 187 people signed up so far is a genuinely alarming number this close to the event. Whether that closes the gap with prior years or confirms the slide is still an open question.

I don’t think there’s one single cause here — new cities, ticket pricing, the broader shift toward regional and local WordCamps, and general conference fatigue post-2020 are all real factors. But it’s hard to look at this data and not connect the U.S. flagship event’s sharpest drop with the year the community’s biggest public fight happened on its own stage.

If you were at WCUS 2025 or are registered for Phoenix this year, I’d genuinely like to hear whether this matches what you saw on the ground.