Tag: WordPress Stats

This article is part of a detailed article series aimed at helping you grow a successful business online with the WordPress platform.

For more information about of the article series, see this post:

• The Business Owner’s Guide To Using WordPress

In this article, we present some statistics about WordPress that will help you understand why millions of businesses around the world rely on WordPress and what kind of businesses and people use WordPress today.

WordPress: Usage And Market Share

A brief summary:

• WordPress started as a blogging tool 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 sixty million installations of WordPress worldwide. This number is growing every day.
• WordPress powers over 30% of the internet. Over one-third of all websites worldwide 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 powered by WordPress.
• Over 35 million searches are made on Google each month for terms related to WordPress.
• WordPress is 100% free to download, use and modify. WordPress is built using an open source content management system.
• WordPress is continually built and improved upon by volunteers. People from all around the world are at work developing and improving WordPress each day.
• The WordPress core program is regularly updated to address bugs and improve its features and security.
• WordPress can deliver your content online to visitors worldwide. WordPress has been translated and localized into over seventy international languages and dialects.
• The WordPress repository currently makes available thousands of free WordPress plugins, themes, and widgets to WordPress users.
• There is virtually no limit to what can be built with WordPress.

WordPress Market Share

A content management system (CMS), is a website maintenance tool for non-technical users. It is designed to make it easy for non-technical users to add, modify 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. WordPress is now the largest self-hosted CMS-based publishing platform in the world, used on millions of websites 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 WordPress) currently attracts more unique visitors than Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, eBay, and Yahoo.com …

(WordPress [hosted] monthly uniques. Source: http://automattic.com/about)

Consider the following WordPress usage statistics:

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

(WordPress CMS usage statistics. Source: trends.builtwith.com/cms)

In terms of CMS dominance, no other platform even comes close to WordPress …

(WordPress Market Share. Source: w3techs.com)

In fact, more and more sites are now being built on the WordPress CMS platform.

WordPress is so popular, that trying to keep up with the latest statistics on WordPress is quite difficult because the information changes so frequently.

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

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

Note: The above download figures represents only the latest version of WordPress. Around one third of all current users have not yet updated their sites to the latest release …

(WordPress versions in current use. Source: https://wordpress.org/about/stats)

Even as this post was being written, the number of downloads has already increased. If you click on the link above and visit the WordPress download counter site, you should expect to see a significantly higher number of downloads … perhaps even a different version, as WordPress 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 software updates in its first 11 years of existence …

(Over one hundred new WordPress versions have been made available to date)

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

(WordPress regularly releases new software versions honoring famous Jazz musicians)

here is an interesting fact: all major WordPress updates are named after well-known Jazz music artists, eg:

• v.2.1 = Ella Fitzgerald (January 22, 2007),
• v.2.2 = Stan Getz (May 16, 2007),
• v.2.8 = Chet Baker (June 11, 2009),
• v.3.5 = Elvin Jones (December 11, 2012),
• v.4.0 = Benny Goodman (September 4, 2014),
• etc …

Who Uses WordPress

Who doesn’t use WordPress? All kinds of businesses and people from all walks of life use WordPress to blog about everything under the sun.

Large brands, business of all sizes, technology companies, celebrities, politicians, famous artists, educational institutions, government sectors, humanitarian organizations – even countries are using WordPress to publish web content and run their official websites and blogs …

WordPress.org Website Showcase

Here are just some of the many sites, organizations and people who use WordPress:

• Businesses & Companies: Coca-Cola France, DC Diaper Bank, Dassault Aviation, Groupe Vivendi, Vogue, etc …
• Celebrities, Politicians, Sports Stars, Actors & Musicians: US Air Force General Chuck Yeager, Narendra Modi, Prime Minister of India, Nancy Pelosi, Justin Bieber, Dallas Mavericks, Riverdance, Dave Matthews Band, Gabriel Iglesias, Jason Mraz, etc …
• Colleges & Educational Institutions: Nicholls State University, International Relations Online at American University, Bates College, Salve Regina University, etc.
• Magazines & Media: Fortune, Time.com, Facebook Newsroom, CBS New York, etc.
• Governments, Public Services & Community Organizations: Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African Art, Chicago Weather Center, São Paulo Carnival, AIDS Project Rhode Island, Amnesty International Korea, etc.

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

• Businesses prefer to download the self-hosted version, which can be installed in their domains and modified to suit their needs. In fact, most WordPress self-hosted installations are business marketing activities.
• 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 self-hosted WordPress sites) published on average 17 new posts per second (around 1.5 million posts per day).

WordPress.com publishes a live map that lets you see blog post updates around the world in real-time …

WordPress (Hosted Version) – Activity Worldwide

In other tutorials, we will explain the difference between WordPress.com (hosted) and WordPress.org (self-hosted) versions.

Other Statistics About WordPress

WordPress Plugins

WordPress users have access to over 37,000 free WordPress plugins …

(WordPress.org free plugins directory)

We have published a comprehensive article about WordPress plugins here:

• Using WP Plugins To Extend Your Website’s Features

WordPress Themes

WordPress users can also access over 1,700 themes at no cost from the WordPress themes repository …

(WP free themes repository)

We have written a detailed article about WP themes here:

• A Newbies’ Guide To Understanding WP Themes

WordPress Language Translations

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

(WordPress language translations)

WordPress Searches

The search term “WordPress” alone receives around 2.7 million searches per month on Google. Additional WordPress-related terms (e.g. “WP themes”, “WordPress plugins”, ”learn WordPress”, etc. brings the total number of searches online for WordPress terms to around 30 million …

(WordPress-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 Rates

According to WordPress’ own “State of the Word” 2014 survey, 25% of all WP users who participated in 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 US$50.

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

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

(Source: Upwork.com)

As you can clearly see from the information above, there is no end in sight for how much further WordPress can continue to grow.

In other blog posts, we will cover the following areas:

• Why WordPress is the smartest option in most situations when it comes to choosing a platform for growing your small business online,
• Over fifty compelling reasons why you should choose WordPress for your 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 to your website, get more leads and subscribers, and sell more products and services with WordPress.
• Plus, we’ll be providing new step-by-step tutorials and examples of how to use WordPress to expand your business presence online, while also saving thousands of dollars on website development and website design costs.

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Information Sources:

The information for this post 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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