Tag: Growth Of WordPress

This article is part of a comprehensive article series aimed at helping you understand how the WordPress content publishing software can help your small business grow and succeed online with the WordPress CMS platform.

For an overview of the article series, see this post:

• A Beginner’s Guide To Building A Successful Small Business Using WordPress

In this blog post, we present a number of surprising statistics about WordPress that will help you understand why millions of businesses around the world use WordPress to power their websites and blogs and what kind of businesses use WordPress today.

WordPress: Statistics And Popularity

In short:

• WordPress started in 2003.
• WordPress is available as a hosted application (WordPress.com) and as a self-hosted, downloadable application (WordPress.org).
• 22 out of every hundred new domains registered in the U.S. are for installing a new WordPress website or blog.
• There are over 60 million installations of WordPress. This number is growing everyday.
• WordPress powers over 30% of the internet. Over one-third of all websites worldwide are driven by 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 websites worldwide using a CMS application are built with WordPress.
• Over 35 million searches made each month on Google are for WordPress related terms.
• The WordPress application is completely free to download, use and modify. WordPress is distributed as an open source content management system.
• WordPress is worked on by volunteers. People from all over the world work on developing and improving the WordPress software on an ongoing basis.
• The WordPress core software is updated on a regular basis to eliminate bugs and improve both its features and security.
• WordPress can deliver your content online to visitors worldwide. WordPress has been translated and localized into over seventy languages and dialects.
• The WordPress repository currently makes available thousands of free WordPress plugins, themes, and widgets to WordPress users.
• There is almost no limit to what you can build with WordPress.

WordPress Market Dominance

A content management system (CMS), is a website tool for non-technical users. It is a web application designed to make it easy for non-technical users to add, edit and manage all content on their site.

WordPress started in 2003. It was originally a simple program developed by co-founders Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little. Since then, it has become the widely-used self-hosted blogging tool in the world, used on millions of sites and seen by tens of millions of people every day.

WordPress is owned by Automattic.com, which currently employs around 300 people, all of whom work from home. Despite its distributed model and so few employees, WordPress.com (the hosted version of the WordPress software) currently attracts more unique monthly views than Facebook, Amazon, Yahoo.com, Twitter, and eBay …

(WordPress.com monthly uniques. Source: Automattic.com)

Here are just some of the latest WordPress usage stats:

WordPress is the world’s leading CMS platform and powers over 30% of the web …

(WP CMS 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 sites are now using the WordPress CMS platform.

WordPress is so popular, that keeping up with statistics on WordPress is very difficult because the numbers change so often.

For example, at the time this article was written, this is the number of downloads of the latest WordPress version …

(Source: https://wordpress.org/download/counter)

Note: The above numbers represents only the latest version of WordPress. Around one third of all current users have not yet upgraded their sites 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 is already increasing. If you were to click on the link above and visit the WordPress download counter page, you will see a significantly higher number of downloads … perhaps even an updated version, as the WordPress development community continually updates the software to fix security issues and bugs, and add new or improved features.

Regarding updates, WordPress has made available over 100 new update versions to date …

(Over one hundred new WordPress versions have been made available since 2003)

WordPress currently releases a new updated version every 3-4 months or so …

(WordPress regularly releases new versions named after famous Jazz musicians)

An interesting fact, is that all major WordPress version releases are typically named in honor of well-known Jazz musicians, eg:

• v.2.0 = Duke Ellington (December 31, 2005),
• v.2.3 = Dexter Gordon (September 24, 2007),
• v.3.0 = Thelonious Monk (June 17, 2010),
• v.3.7 = Count Basie (October 24, 2013),
• v.4.0 = Benny Goodman (September 4, 2014),
• etc …

Who Is Using WordPress

A better question is who doesn’t use WordPress? All different types of enterprises and people are using WordPress to blog about everything under the sun.

Large brands, businesses, technology companies, celebrities, sports stars, famous artists, colleges, government department sites, not-for-profits – even nations are using WordPress to publish web content and run their official websites …

WordPress.org Blog Showcase

Here are just some of the growing number of businesses, companies and people who have built their online presence with WordPress:

• Businesses & Companies: Coca-Cola France, Dole, GDF SUEZ, McDonald’s Singapore, Mercedes-Benz, etc …
• Celebs, Politicians, Sports Stars, Actors & Musicians: US Air Force General Chuck Yeager, Ariana Grande, Kylie Minogue, Beyoncé, Dallas Mavericks, Snoop Dogg, Blondie, Channing Tatum, Jason Mraz, etc …
• Colleges & Educational Institutions: Georgia State University, International Relations Online at American University, UCF College of Medicine, Carleton University, etc.
• Magazines & Media: Tribune Media, The Australian, IMC TV, CBS New York, etc.
• Governments, Public Services & Community Organizations: Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African Art, Canadian Museum of History, Maryland National Road Association, CURE International, Rotary Means Business – Rotary Club, etc.

Earlier, we mentioned that WordPress is available as a hosted platform (WordPress.com) and as a self-hosted, downloadable software (WordPress.org).

• Businesses often choose the self-hosted version, which can be installed on their own domains and customized to suit their needs. In fact, most WordPress self-hosted installations are business marketing or sales purposes.
• More than half of all WordPress users use the hosted version on WordPress.com
• In 2014, WordPress blogs (blogs hosted either on WordPress.com or self-hosted WordPress sites) published on average 17 posts every second (around 1.5 million posts per day).

WordPress.com publishes a live map that shows the latest activity across its hosted platform …

WordPress.com – Live Users WorldWide

In other articles, we will cover the differences between WordPress.com (hosted) vs WordPress.org (self-hosted) versions.

General Statistics About WordPress

WordPress Plugins

WordPress users have access to over 37,000 WP plugins at no cost …

(WP plugin directory)

For more information about plugins see this post:

• WordPress Plugins – The Easy Way To Enhance Your Site’s Capabilities

WordPress Themes

WordPress users also have access to over 1,700 WordPress themes at no cost from the WordPress free themes directory …

(WordPress.org free themes repository)

For more information about themes see this post:

• Understanding WP Themes – A Practical Guide

WordPress Language Translations

WordPress has been translated and localized into over 70 international languages in addition to English …

(WordPress.org language translations)

Searching Online For WordPress

The search term “WordPress” alone receives around 2.7 million monthly searches on Google. Adding WordPress-related terms (e.g. “WP themes”, “WP plugins”, “WordPress tutorials”, etc. brings the total number of searches online for WordPress terms to around thirty million …

(WP-related searches online)

If you compare searches for WordPress to other CMS platforms, WordPress gets searched five times more than Joomla and nine times more often than Drupal.

WordPress Developers

According to WordPress’ own “State of the Word” 2014 survey, a quarter of 33,000 users who answered the survey said that they make a full-time living off WordPress. An earlier survey conducted by WordPress (2012) also found that the average hourly rate of WordPress projects is around US$50.

You can find WordPress designers and developers for hire by searching on freelancing sites like Upwork …

According to Upwork, the typical job cost ranges for WordPress are between $10 – $500 …

(Source: Upwork)

As you can see, there is no end in sight for how much further WordPress can continue to grow and dominate in the CMS landscape.

In other articles, we will cover the following areas in great detail:

• Why WordPress is the best choice when you need a vehicle for growing your small business online,
• Dozens of great reasons why you should choose WordPress for your business website or blog, including a detailed review of the unique benefits, features, and advantages of using the WordPress platform,
• How to automate your business with WordPress,
• How to generate targeted traffic to your site, get more leads, and sell more products and services with WordPress.
• Plus, we’ll be publishing many tutorials and actual tips and examples on how you can use WordPress and grow your business presence online, and save thousands of dollars on web development and website design costs.

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References:

The above statistics 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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