This blog post is part of a comprehensive series of articles designed to help business owners and non-technical users succeed online with the WordPress content publishing platform.
For an overview of the article series, see this post:
In this blog post, you will learn a number of surprising WordPress statistics that will help you understand why millions of businesses around the world choose WordPress and what kind of businesses are using WordPress today.
How Popular Is WordPress? Facts And Figures About WordPress
Below is a summary of what this article will cover:
- WordPress began in 2003.
- WordPress offers users the choice of two formats: a hosted platform (WordPress.com) and as a self-hosted, downloadable software (WordPress.org).
- 23 out of every one hundred new domains registered in the U.S. are for a new WordPress website or blog.
- There are well over 60 million installations of WordPress. This number increases everyday.
- WordPress powers over 30% of the internet. Over one-third of all websites around the world are powered 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 sites worldwide using a CMS application are built with WordPress.
- Over 35 million searches made each month on Google are for terms related to WordPress.
- The WordPress application is 100% 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 around the world work on developing and improving WordPress functionality every day.
- The WordPress core software is updated on a regular basis to eliminate bugs and improve its usage and security.
- WordPress delivers content online to visitors worldwide. WordPress has been translated and localized into over 70 languages and dialects.
- WordPress currently makes available thousands of free WP plugins, themes, and widgets to WordPress users.
- There is almost no limit to what can be built using 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 website users to add, edit and manage content on their site.
WordPress began in 2003. It was originally a simple program developed by co-founders Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little. Since then, WordPress has grown to be the widely-used 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 its distributed model and so few employees, WordPress.com (the hosted version of WordPress) currently attracts more unique views per month than Amazon, Facebook, eBay, Yahoo, and Twitter …
(WordPress.com monthly uniques. Source: Automattic.com)
Consider the following WordPress usage figures:
WordPress is the world’s leading CMS platform and powers over 30% of the web …
(WP usage stats. 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 websites and blogs are being built with WordPress.
WordPress is so popular, that keeping up with the latest statistics on WordPress is difficult because the information changes so frequently.
For example, at the time this article was published, this 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 installations to the latest version …
(WP versions in current 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 page, you will no doubt see a much higher figure … 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.
Speaking of updates, WordPress has made available to users over one hundred new updates since 2003 …
(Over 100 new versions of WordPress have been released in its first 11 years)
WordPress currently releases a new version every 3-4 months or so …
(WordPress regularly releases new software versions honoring famous Jazz musicians)
Interestingly enough, all major WordPress version updates have a tradition of being named in honor of well-known Jazz musicians, eg:
- v.1.2 = Charles Mingus (May 22, 2004),
- v.2.2 = Stan Getz (May 16, 2007),
- v.3.2 = George Gershwin (July 4, 2011),
- v.3.5 = Elvin Jones (December 11, 2012),
- v.4.0 = Benny Goodman (September 4, 2014),
- etc …
Who Uses WordPress
A better question is who isn’t using WordPress? All different kinds of businesses and people use WordPress to publish content about everything under the sun.
Well-known brands, businesses, technology companies, celebrities, politicians, famous actors, universities, government sectors, not-for-profits – even nations use WordPress to run their official websites …
WordPress.org Blog Showcase
Here are just some of the businesses, companies and people using WordPress:
- Global Brands & Companies: Coca-Cola France, Public Storage Canada, GDF SUEZ, Groupe Vivendi, Mercedes-Benz, etc …
- Celebs, Politicians, Sports Stars, Artists & Musicians: Garth Brooks, Ariana Grande, Kylie Minogue, Justin Bieber, Dallas Mavericks, Riverdance, Kobe Bryant, Channing Tatum, Sylvester Stallone, etc …
- Colleges & Educational Institutions: Nicholls State University, International Relations Online at American University, UCF College of Medicine, MIT Sloan Management Review, etc.
- Magazines & Online Media: Fortune, New York Post, IMC TV, CBS New York, etc.
- Governments, Not For Profits & Humanitarian Organizations: Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African Art, Canadian Museum of History, Slow Food Italia, AIDS Project Rhode Island, Rotary Means Business – Rotary Club, etc.
Earlier, we mentioned that WordPress offers users the choice of two formats: a hosted application (WordPress.com) and as a self-hosted, downloadable application (WordPress.org).
- Businesses prefer to download the self-hosted version, which can be installed in their own domains and freely 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, WordPress blogs (blogs hosted either on WordPress.com or externally-hosted WordPress sites) published on average 17 blog posts per second (around 1.5 million posts per day).
You can see a live map that shows the latest activity across its hosted service …
WordPress (Hosted Version) – Activity
In other articles, we examine the main differences between WordPress.com (hosted) and WordPress.org (self-hosted) versions.
General WordPress Statistics
WordPress Plugins
WordPress users have access to over 37,000 free plugins from the WordPress plugins directory …
(WordPress.org plugin repository)
We have published a detailed article about WordPress plugins here:
WordPress Themes
WordPress users also have access to over 1,700 themes for free from the WordPress theme directory …
(WordPress free themes directory)
We have published a great article about themes here:
WordPress Language Translations
WordPress has been translated and localized into over 70 languages in addition to English …
(WP languages)
WordPress Searches
The search term “WordPress” alone receives around 2.7 million searches per month on Google. Including 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 thirty million …
(WordPress searches online)
If you compare searches for WordPress to other CMS platforms, WordPress is searched five times more than Joomla and 9x more than Drupal.
WordPress Services
According to WordPress’ own “State of the Word” 2014 survey, one quarter of 33,000 users who participated in the survey stated 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 developers and designers for hire by searching on freelancing sites like Upwork.com …
According to Upwork, the typical cost for WordPress jobs is 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 and dominate in the CMS arena.
In other articles, we will explore the following areas of WordPress:
- Why WordPress is the best option in most situations when it comes to choosing a platform to grow your small business online,
- Over 50 reasons why you should choose WordPress for your business website or blog, including a detailed breakdown of the benefits, features, and advantages of using WordPress,
- How to automate your business marketing with WordPress,
- How to generate targeted traffic to your site, increase conversions, and how to sell more products and services with WordPress.
- Plus, we’ll provide new tutorials and examples of how you can use WordPress and grow your business presence online, while also saving thousands of dollars on the costs of website development and web design.
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References:
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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