This article is part of a comprehensive multi-part series of articles designed to help you understand how the WordPress platform can help your small business grow and succeed online.
For an overview of the article series, see this post:
In this article, we present a number of WordPress usage facts and figures that will help you understand why millions of businesses around the world use WordPress to power their business websites and blogs and what kind of people and businesses use WordPress today.
Statistics And Market Share About WordPress
In short:
- WordPress started as a blogging tool in 2003.
- WordPress is available as a hosted platform (WordPress.com) and as a self-hosted, downloadable software (WordPress.org).
- 22 out of every one hundred new domains registered in the U.S. are for installing a new WordPress website.
- There are well over sixty million installations of WordPress. This number increases every day.
- WordPress powers over 30% of the internet. Over one-third of all websites around the world are built with WordPress.
- WordPress sites around the world publish an average of 24 posts per second.
- WordPress sites receive over 22 billion monthly pageviews.
- WordPress blogs receive around 50 million comments per month.
- WordPress has been translated into over 70 languages.
- More than 60% of all sites that use a CMS application are built with WordPress.
- Over 30,000,000 searches made each month on Google are for WordPress related terms.
- The WordPress application is completely free to download, use and modify. The WordPress application is distributed under an open source content management system.
- WordPress is continually built by volunteers. Thousands of people from all around the world are at work developing and improving the WordPress software on an ongoing basis.
- WordPress is updated on a regular basis to eliminate bugs and improve its ease of use and security.
- WordPress delivers content online to visitors worldwide. WordPress has been translated and localized into over 70 international languages.
- The WordPress repository currently makes available thousands of free WP plugins, themes, and widgets to WordPress users.
- There is practically no limit to what you can do with WordPress.
WordPress Usage
A content management system (CMS), is a website tool for non-technical users. It is a web application designed to make it easier for non-technical website users to add, edit and manage content on their website.
WordPress started in 2003. It was originally a simple program developed by co-founders Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little. WordPress is now the most popular self-hosted blogging tool in the world, used on millions of sites and accessed by tens of millions of people every day.
WordPress is owned by Automattic.com, which currently employs around 300 people, all of whom are home-based. Despite being a distributed company with so few employees, WordPress.com (the hosted version of the software) currently attracts more unique visitors than Facebook, Amazon, Twitter, Yahoo, and eBay …
(WordPress [hosted] monthly uniques. Source: Automattic.com)
Consider the following statistics on WordPress CMS usage:
WordPress is the world’s leading CMS platform and powers over 30% of the web …
(WordPress usage stats. Source: trends.builtwith.com/cms)
In terms of CMS market share, no other platform even comes close to WordPress …
(WordPress Market Share. Source: w3techs.com)
In fact, more websites today are using the WordPress CMS platform.
WordPress is so popular, that even trying to keep up with the latest statistics on WordPress is very difficult because the data changes so frequently.
For example, at the time this post was published, this is the number of downloads of the latest WordPress version …
(Source: https://wordpress.org/download/counter)
Note: The above download numbers represents only the most recently released version of WordPress. Around one third of all current users have not yet updated their installations to the latest version …
(WordPress versions currently in use. Source: https://wordpress.org/about/stats)
Even as this article was being written, the number of downloads has already shot up. If you were to click on the link above and visit the WordPress download counter site, you should expect to see a much higher download figure … perhaps even a newer version, as the WordPress developer team continually updates the software to fix security issues and bugs, and add new or improved features.
Speaking of updates, WordPress has released over 100 new software versions to date …
(Over one hundred new versions of WordPress have been made available in its first 11 years)
WordPress currently releases a new updated version every 3-4 months …
(WordPress regularly releases new version updates named after famous Jazz musicians)
Incidentally, all major WordPress releases are named in honor of Jazz musicians, eg:
- v.1.0 = Miles Davis (January 3, 2004),
- v.2.5 = Michael Brecker (March 29, 2008),
- v.2.8 = Chet Baker (June 11, 2009),
- v.3.6 = Oscar Peterson (August 1, 2013),
- v.3.9 = Jimmy Smith (April 16, 2014),
- etc …
Who Is Using WordPress?
In a nutshell, all types of companies and people are using WordPress to publish content about everything and anything.
Large corporations, businesses, technology companies, celebrities, politicians, famous musicians, educational institutions, government department sites, non-profit organizations – even countries are using WordPress to publish web content and run their official sites …
WP Blog Showcase
Here are just some of the sites, companies and people using WordPress:
- Businesses & Companies: Google Ventures, Boardshorts.com, Method Products, McDonald’s Singapore, Vogue, etc …
- Celebs, Politicians, Sports Stars, Actors & Musicians: Garth Brooks, Rush, Pixies, Justin Bieber, Usain Bolt, The Rolling Stones, Blondie, Howie Mandel, Jason Mraz, etc …
- Colleges & Educational Institutions: Georgia State University, Milwaukee School of Engineering’s Bridge, UCF College of Medicine, Carleton University, etc.
- Magazines & News Media: Thrive Magazine, New York Post, IMC TV, LinkedIn, etc.
- Government Sites, Public Services & Community Organizations: Sweden’s Official Site, Canadian Museum of History, The National Art Gallery of Maldives, CURE International, Ovarian Cancer National Alliance, etc.
Earlier, we mentioned that WordPress offers users two formats: a hosted application (WordPress.com) and as a self-hosted, downloadable application (WordPress.org).
- Businesses prefer the self-hosted version, which can be installed in their domain and freely modified to suit their needs. In fact, most WordPress self-hosted installations are used for marketing or promoting businesses.
- More than half of all WordPress users use the hosted version on WordPress.com
- In 2014, blogs belonging to the WordPress network (blogs hosted either on WordPress.com or externally-hosted WordPress sites) published on average 17 posts per second (around 1.5 million per day).
WordPress.com publishes a live map that shows the latest user activity across its hosted service …
WordPress.com – Live Users WorldWide
In other tutorials, we address the differences between WordPress.com (hosted) vs WordPress.org (self-hosted) versions.
Other WordPress Statistics
WordPress Plugins
WordPress users have access to over almost 40,000 free WordPress plugins from the WordPress free plugins repository …
(WP free plugins directory)
We have published a comprehensive article about WP plugins here:
WordPress Themes
WordPress users also have access to over 1,700 themes for free …
(WordPress.org free themes directory)
For a detailed article about themes go here:
Translations Of WordPress
WordPress has been translated and localized into over seventy international languages and dialects in addition to English …
(WP languages)
WordPress Searches
The search term “WordPress” alone receives around 2.7 million searches per month on Google. Additional WordPress-related terms (e.g. “WordPress themes”, “WordPress plugins”, ”learn WordPress”, etc. brings the total number of online searches for WordPress terms to more than 37 million …
(WordPress-related searches online)
If you compare searches for WordPress to other CMS platforms, WordPress is searched five times more than Joomla and nine times more often than Drupal.
WordPress Rates
According to WordPress’ own “State of the Word” 2014 survey, 25% of all 33,000 WordPress users who answered the survey stated that they make a full-time living off WordPress. An earlier survey conducted by WordPress (2012) also found that the median hourly rate of WordPress projects is US$50.
You can find WordPress designers and developers for hire by searching on freelancing sites like Upwork.com …
According to Upwork.com, the typical job cost ranges for WordPress are around $10 – $500 …
(Source: Upwork)
As you can clearly see, WordPress is set for continued growth for many years to come.
In other blog posts, we will cover the following:
- Why WordPress is the best choice when you need a platform to grow your small business online,
- Dozens of reasons why you should choose WordPress for your business website or blog, including a detailed review of the benefits, features, and advantages of using the WordPress CMS platform,
- How to automate your business marketing with WordPress,
- How to generate more traffic to your website, get more leads and subscribers, and how to sell more products and services with WordPress.
- Plus, we’ll be providing lots of tutorials and examples on how you can use WordPress and grow your business online, while also saving thousands of dollars on web development and website design costs.
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Sources:
The above figures were sourced from various locations around the web, including the following sites:
- https://wordpress.org
- https://wordpress.com
- http://automattic.com
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordPress
- http://w3techs.com/technologies/details/cm-wordpress/all/all
- http://trends.builtwith.com/cms
- http://ma.tt/2014/10/sotw-2014
- https://managewp.com/14-surprising-statistics-about-wordpress-usage
- http://torquemag.io/13-surprising-wordpress-statistics
- https://websitebuilder.org/resources/amazing-facts-you-probably-dont-know-about-wordpress
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