This article is part of a multi-part article series designed to help you understand how the WordPress platform can help your small business achieve its business goals online with the WordPress content publishing application.
For an overview of the article series, see this post:
In this article, you will learn a number of surprising facts and figures about WordPress that will help you understand why millions of businesses around the world choose WordPress to power their websites and what kind of businesses and people use WordPress today.
WordPress: How Popular Is It? Some Impressive Facts And Figures About WordPress
A brief summary:
- WordPress began as a blogging tool in 2003.
- WordPress is available as a hosted platform (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 site.
- There are over 60 million installations of WordPress worldwide. This number grows significantly everyday.
- 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 websites worldwide that use a content management system are built with WordPress.
- Over 35,000,000 searches are made on Google each month for WordPress related terms.
- WordPress is completely free to download, use and modify. The WordPress application is built using an open source content management system.
- WordPress code is built by volunteers. People from all over the world are at work developing and improving WordPress functionality on an ongoing basis.
- WordPress is continually being updated to fix bugs and improve its ease of use and security.
- WordPress delivers 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 plugins, themes, and widgets to WordPress users.
- There is practically no limit to what someone can do with WordPress.
WordPress CMS Market Dominance
A content management system (CMS), is a website maintenance tool for non-technical users. It is a web application designed to make it easy for non-technical users to add, modify and manage all content on their site.
WordPress began 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 CMS application 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 work from home. Despite its distributed model and having so few employees, WordPress.com (the hosted version of the software) currently attracts more unique monthly views than Amazon, Facebook, Yahoo.com, Twitter, and eBay …
(WordPress [hosted] monthly uniques. Source: Automattic.com)
Consider the following WordPress CMS usage stats:
WordPress is the world’s leading CMS platform and powers over 30% of the web …
(WP CMS usage statistics. Source: trends.builtwith.com/cms)
In terms of CMS usage, no other platform even comes close to WordPress …
(WordPress Market Share. Source: w3techs.com)
In fact, more sites are now powered by the WordPress CMS application.
WordPress is so popular, that even keeping up with the latest statistics on WordPress is difficult because the information changes so often.
For example, at the time this post was published, this is the current number of downloads of the latest WordPress version …
(Source: https://wordpress.org/download/counter)
Note: The above figure represents only the latest version of WordPress. Around one third of all current users have not yet upgraded their sites to the latest release …
(WordPress versions currently in use. Source: https://wordpress.org/about/stats)
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 site, you will no doubt see a significantly higher download figure … perhaps even a newer version, as the WordPress development team continually updates the software to fix security issues and bugs, and add new or improved features.
Speaking of updates, WordPress has made available to users over one hundred new updates to date …
(Over one hundred new WordPress versions have been released to date)
WordPress currently releases a new software update every 3-4 months …
(WordPress regularly releases new software versions named after famous Jazz musicians)
Interestingly enough, all major WordPress updates are typically named after Jazz music artists, eg:
- v.2.0 = Duke Ellington (December 31, 2005),
- v.2.3 = Dexter Gordon (September 24, 2007),
- v.3.2 = George Gershwin (July 4, 2011),
- v.3.4 = Grant Green (June 13, 2012),
- v.3.9 = Jimmy Smith (April 16, 2014),
- etc …
Who Is Using WordPress
A better question is who isn’t using WordPress nowadays? All different kinds of enterprises and people from all walks of life are using WordPress to publish content about everything and anything.
Popular brands, business of all sizes, technology companies, celebrities, sports stars, famous artists, universities, government sectors, community organizations – even countries are using WordPress …
WordPress Showcase
Here are just some of the many sites, companies and people who have chosen to use WordPress:
- Businesses & Corporations: Bata, Glad, Dassault Aviation, McDonald’s Singapore, Mercedes-Benz, etc …
- Famous People, Politicians, Sports Stars, Actors & Musicians: US Air Force General Chuck Yeager, Narendra Modi, Prime Minister of India, The Meredith Vieira Show, Beyoncé, The Sacramento Ballet, Snoop Dogg, Kobe Bryant, Howie Mandel, Jason Mraz, etc …
- Colleges & Educational Institutions: Georgia State University, Stony Brook University School of Journalism, Bates College, The University of Mary Washington, etc.
- Magazines & Media: Time Inc., The Australian, FiveThirtyEight, CBS New York, etc.
- Governments, Not For Profits & Community Organizations: Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African Art, Canadian Olympic Committee, The National Art Gallery of Maldives, Official Gazette of the Republic of the Philippines, 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 clearly prefer the self-hosted version, which can be installed in their domains and customized to suit their needs. In fact, most WordPress self-hosted installations are used for business activities.
- 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 externally-hosted WordPress sites) published on average 17 posts per second (around 1.5 million posts per day).
WordPress publishes a live map that shows user activity across its hosted service …
WordPress.com – Activity Around The World
In later tutorials, we will address the main differences between WordPress.com (hosted) vs WordPress.org (self-hosted) versions.
Other Statistics About WordPress
WordPress Plugins
WordPress users have access to over 37,000 free plugins from the WordPress plugin repository …
(WordPress free plugins repository)
For more information about WordPress plugins go here:
WordPress Themes
WordPress users can also download and install over 1,700 free themes …
(WordPress free themes directory)
We have written a detailed article about themes here:
WordPress Translations
WordPress has been translated and localized into over 70 international languages and dialects in addition to English …
(WordPress languages)
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-seven million …
(WordPress-related searches online)
If you compare searches for WordPress to other CMS platforms, WordPress is searched five times as much as Joomla and nine times more often than Drupal.
WordPress Developers
According to WordPress’ own “State of the Word” 2014 survey, one quarter of 33,000 WP users who participated in the survey stated that they make a full-time living off the WordPress CMS. An earlier survey conducted by WordPress (2012) also found that the median hourly rate of WordPress projects is around US$50.
You can find WordPress developers and designers for hire by searching on freelancing sites like Upwork.com …
According to Upwork.com, the typical cost for WordPress jobs is around $10 – $500 …
(Source: Upwork)
As you can see from the information presented above, the dominance of WordPress is predicted to continue for a long time to come.
In other articles, you will learn:
- Why WordPress is the best platform to grow your small business online,
- Over fifty reasons why you should choose WordPress for your business website or blog, including a comprehensive review of the unique benefits, features, and advantages of using the WordPress CMS platform,
- Ways to automate your business marketing with WordPress,
- How to generate targeted traffic, increase conversions, and sell more products and services with WordPress.
- Plus, we’ll provide lots of ”how to” tutorials and practical tips on how you can use WordPress to expand your business presence online, while also saving thousands of dollars on the costs of website development and website design.
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Sources:
The information for this article was 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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