This blog post is part of an article series designed to help small business owners grow online.
For an overview of the article series, go here:
In this article, we present some facts and figures about WordPress that will help you understand why millions of businesses around the world rely on WordPress and what kind of businesses and people are using WordPress today.
WordPress Statistics
Below is a summary of what you will learn in this post:
- WordPress began as a blogging tool in 2003.
- WordPress offers users two formats: a hosted platform (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 or blog.
- There are well 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 worldwide 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 websites that use a CMS application are built with WordPress.
- Over 37,000,000 searches made each month on Google are for terms related to WordPress.
- WordPress is 100% free to download, use and modify. WordPress is distributed under an open source content management system.
- WordPress code is built and improved upon by volunteers. People from all over the world are at work developing and improving WordPress functionality each day.
- WordPress is updated on a regular basis to address bugs and improve both its features and security.
- WordPress delivers content online to visitors worldwide. WordPress has been translated and localized into over seventy languages.
- WordPress currently makes available thousands of free WordPress plugins, themes, and widgets to WordPress users.
- There is virtually no limit to what you can do with WordPress.
WordPress CMS Market Share
A content management system (CMS), is a web tool for non-technical users. It is a web application designed to make it easy for non-technical website users to add, modify and manage content on their site.
WordPress began in 2003. It was originally written by Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little. It is currently the most popular self-hosted blogging tool in the world, used on millions of websites 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 are home-based. Despite being a distributed company with so few employees, WordPress.com (the hosted version of the WordPress software) currently attracts more unique views per month than Facebook, Amazon, Yahoo, eBay, and Twitter …
(WordPress.com monthly uniques. Source: Automattic.com)
Consider the following stats on WordPress usage:
WordPress is the world’s leading CMS platform and powers over 30% of the web …
(WP CMS usage figures. 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 sites are powered by the WordPress CMS application.
WordPress is so popular, that even keeping up with the latest statistics on WordPress is quite difficult because the data changes so frequently.
For example, at the time this article was published, this is the current number of downloads of the latest WordPress version …
(Source: https://wordpress.org/download/counter)
Note: The above figures represents only the most recent version of WordPress. Around one third of all current users have not yet updated their sites to the latest version …
(WP versions in current use. Source: https://wordpress.org/about/stats)
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 page, you will see a much higher number of downloads … perhaps even a newer 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 to users over 100 new software updates in its first 11 years of existence …
(Over 100 new versions of WordPress 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 version updates have a tradition of being named in honor of well-known Jazz music artists, eg:
- v.1.0 = Miles Davis (January 3, 2004),
- v.2.5 = Michael Brecker (March 29, 2008),
- v.2.9 = Carmen McRae (December 18, 2009),
- v.3.3 = Sonny Stitt (December 12, 2011),
- v.3.8 = Charlie Parker (December 12, 2013),
- etc …
Who Is Using WordPress
A better question is who isn’t using WordPress? All types of enterprises and people from all walks of life use WordPress to blog about everything and anything.
Large corporations, businesses, technology companies, celebrities, politicians, famous musicians, universities, government department sites, humanitarian organizations – even countries are using WordPress to run their official websites …
WordPress.org Site Showcase
Here are just some of the sites, organizations and people using WordPress:
- Businesses & Corporations: Google Ventures, Public Storage Canada, Dassault Aviation, McDonald’s Singapore, Hyatt Blog, etc …
- Celebs, Politicians, Sports Stars, Artists & Musicians: Alanis Morissette, Narendra Modi, Prime Minister of India, Kylie Minogue, Justin Bieber, Usain Bolt, The Rolling Stones, Blondie, Gabriel Iglesias, Jason Mraz, etc …
- Colleges & Educational Institutions: University of Manitoba Today, International Relations Online at American University, UCF College of Medicine, Carleton University, etc.
- Magazines & Online Media: Fortune, The Australian, InStyle News, Dusty Cartridge, etc.
- Governments, Public Services & Community Organizations: Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African Art, Canadian Olympic Committee, São Paulo Carnival, UK Government Cabinet Office Digital Team, Rotary Means Business – Rotary Club, etc.
Earlier, we mentioned that WordPress is available as a hosted application (WordPress.com) and as a self-hosted, downloadable software (WordPress.org).
- Businesses prefer to download the self-hosted version, which can be installed on their domain 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, blogs belonging to the WordPress network (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 provides a live map showing the latest user activity across its hosted platform …
WordPress (Hosted Version) – Activity
In other tutorials, we will present the main differences between WordPress.com (hosted) and WordPress.org (self-hosted) versions.
Additional WordPress Statistics
WordPress Plugins
WordPress users can download and install over 37,000 plugins at no cost from the WordPress plugins directory …
(WP plugin directory)
For more information about plugins see this post:
WordPress Themes
WordPress users can also download and install over 1,700 free themes from the WordPress free themes directory …
(WordPress.org free themes repository)
We have published a detailed article about themes here:
WordPress Language Translations
WordPress has been translated and localized into over 70 languages in addition to English …
(WordPress languages)
Searching Online For WordPress
The search term “WordPress” alone receives around 2.7 million searches per month on Google. Adding WordPress-related terms (e.g. “WP themes”, “WordPress plugins”, “WordPress tutorials”, etc. brings the total number of searches online for WordPress terms to more than thirty 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 9x more often than Drupal.
WordPress Services
According to WordPress’ own “State of the Word” 2014 survey, one quarter of 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 US$50.
You can find WordPress designers and developers for hire by searching on freelancing sites like Upwork …
According to Upwork.com, the typical cost for WordPress jobs is around $10 – $500 …
(Source: Upwork.com)
As you can see from the above facts and figures, the dominance of WordPress is predicted to continue for many years to come.
In other articles, you will learn:
- Why WordPress is the best platform to grow your small business online,
- Dozens of reasons why you should choose WordPress for your website or blog, including a comprehensive look at the unique benefits, features, and advantages of using the WordPress CMS platform,
- How to automate your business with WordPress,
- How to drive more traffic, increase conversions, and how to sell more products and services with WordPress.
- Plus, we’ll be publishing loads of ”how to” tutorials and examples on how to use WordPress to expand your business online, and save thousands of dollars on web development and website design costs.
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Sources:
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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"I have used the tutorials to teach all of my clients and it has probably never been so easy for everyone to learn WordPress ... Now I don't need to buy all these very expensive video courses that often don't deliver what they promise." - Stefan Wendt, Internet Marketing Success Group