This article is part of an article series designed to help you understand how the WordPress CMS can help your small business achieve its online goals.
For more information about of the article series, go here:
In this blog post, you will learn a number of surprising WordPress facts and figures that will help you understand why millions of businesses around the world use WordPress and what kind of businesses and people use WordPress today.
WordPress: Facts And Statistics
The quick version:
- WordPress began in 2003.
- WordPress is available in two formats: a hosted application (WordPress.com) and as a self-hosted, downloadable application (WordPress.org).
- 22 out of every 100 new domains registered in the U.S. are for a new WordPress website.
- There are well over sixty million installations of WordPress. This number grows 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 content management system are powered by WordPress.
- Over 35,000,000 searches made each month on Google are for WordPress related terms.
- WordPress is completely free to download, use and modify. WordPress is built using an open source content management system.
- WordPress code is continually built and improved upon by volunteers. 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 fix bugs and improve its features and security.
- WordPress delivers content online to visitors worldwide. WordPress has been translated and localized into over 70 languages.
- WordPress currently makes available thousands of free WordPress plugins, themes, and widgets to WordPress users.
- There is almost no limit to what you can do with WordPress.
WordPress Market Dominance
A content management system (CMS), is a web tool for non-technical users. It is a web application designed to make it easier for non-technical website users to add, modify and manage all content on their website.
WordPress started in 2003. It was originally a simple program developed by co-founders Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little. Since then, it has grown to be the widely-used self-hosted content management system (CMS) 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 being a distributed company with so few employees, WordPress.com (the hosted version of WordPress) currently attracts more unique views per month than Facebook, Amazon, Twitter, Yahoo.com, and eBay …
(WordPress [hosted] monthly uniques. Source: http://automattic.com/about)
Consider the following statistics on WordPress:
WordPress is the world’s leading CMS platform and powers over 30% of the web …
(WP 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 websites and blogs are now using 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 post was written, here is the current number of downloads of the latest WordPress version …
(Source: https://wordpress.org/download/counter)
Note: The above 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)
As this post 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 see a much 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 released over one hundred new software versions in its first 11 years of existence …
(Over 100 new versions of WordPress have been released to date)
WordPress currently releases a new version every 3-4 months …
(WordPress regularly releases new software versions honoring famous Jazz musicians)
An interesting fact, is that all major WordPress upgrades are named after Jazz music artists, eg:
- v.1.5 = Billy Strayhorn (February 17, 2005),
- v.2.2 = Stan Getz (May 16, 2007),
- v.3.2 = George Gershwin (July 4, 2011),
- v.3.6 = Oscar Peterson (August 1, 2013),
- v.3.9 = Jimmy Smith (April 16, 2014),
- etc …
Who Is Using WordPress
Who doesn’t use WordPress nowadays? All different kinds of enterprises and people use WordPress to publish content about everything and anything.
Giant brands, businesses, technology companies, celebrities, sports stars, famous musicians, colleges, government sectors, non-profit organizations – even countries are using WordPress …
WordPress Site Showcase
Here are just some of the sites, institutions and people who have chosen to use WordPress:
- Businesses & Corporations: Google Ventures, Public Storage Canada, GDF SUEZ, Groupe Vivendi, Hyatt Blog, etc …
- Famous People, Politicians, Sports Stars, Artists & Musicians: Alanis Morissette, Ariana Grande, Lily Allen, Justin Bieber, The Sacramento Ballet, Snoop Dogg, Katie Couric, Channing Tatum, Russell Brand, etc …
- Colleges & Educational Institutions: Georgia State University, Milwaukee School of Engineering’s Bridge, UCF College of Medicine, Carleton University, etc.
- Magazines & Online Media: Tribune Media, The New Yorker, FiveThirtyEight, LinkedIn, etc.
- Governments, Not For Profits & Humanitarian Organizations: Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African Art, Chicago Weather Center, São Paulo Carnival, Official Gazette of the Republic of the Philippines, Amnesty International Korea, etc.
Earlier, we mentioned that WordPress offers two formats: a hosted platform (WordPress.com) and as a self-hosted, downloadable application (WordPress.org).
- Businesses prefer to download the self-hosted version, which can be installed on their own domain names and freely modified 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, blogs belonging to the WordPress network (blogs hosted either on WordPress.com or externally-hosted WordPress sites) published on average 17 blog posts every 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) – Live Users WorldWide
In later posts, we will address the difference between WordPress.com (hosted) and WordPress.org (self-hosted) versions.
Additional WordPress Statistics
WordPress Plugins
WordPress users have access to over 37,000 free plugins from the WordPress free plugin directory …
(WordPress.org plugin directory)
We have written a great article about WP plugins here:
WordPress Themes
WordPress users can also download and install over 1,700 WordPress themes for free from the WordPress themes repository …
(WordPress free themes repository)
For a detailed article about themes see this post:
WordPress Language Translations
WordPress has been translated and localized into over 70 international languages and dialects in addition to English …
(WordPress language translations)
Searching Online For WordPress
The search term “WordPress” alone receives around 2.7 million monthly searches on Google. Including WordPress-related terms (e.g. “WP themes”, “WordPress plugins”, “WordPress tutorials”, etc. brings the total number of online searches for WordPress terms to more than 30 million …
(WP searches online)
If you compare searches for WordPress to other CMS platforms, WordPress gets searched online 5 x as much as Joomla and nine times more than Drupal.
WordPress Developers
According to WordPress’ own “State of the Word” 2014 survey, one quarter of 33,000 WP users who responded to 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 around US$50.
You can find WordPress designers and developers for hire at freelancing sites like Upwork.com …
According to Upwork.com, the typical cost for WordPress jobs is around $10 – $500 …
(Source: Upwork.com)
As you can see from the statistics above, the dominance of WordPress is predicted to continue for many years to come.
In other articles, you will learn:
- Why WordPress is an ideal platform to grow your business online,
- Dozens of compelling 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,
- Ways to automate your business marketing with WordPress,
- How to generate targeted visitors, get more leads, and how to sell more products and services with WordPress.
- Plus, we’ll be regularly posting many tutorials and examples of how you can use WordPress to grow your business online, while also saving thousands of dollars on web development and web design costs.
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References:
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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