WordPress – Useful Facts And Statistics

This blog post is part of a detailed series of articles designed to help business owners and non-technical users succeed online with the WordPress content publishing application.

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

• Learning WordPress – The Business Owner’s Guide

In this article, you will learn a number of impressive facts and figures about WordPress that will help you understand why millions of businesses around the world use WordPress to power their websites and blogs and what kind of businesses and people use WordPress today.

WordPress: Facts And Figures

A brief summary:

• WordPress started as a blogging tool in 2003.
• WordPress is available as 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 installing a new WordPress site.
• There are well over 60 million installations of WordPress. This number increases every day.
• 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 sites worldwide using a content management system are built with WordPress.
• Over 37 million searches made each month on Google are for terms related to WordPress.
• The WordPress application is 100% free to download, use and modify. WordPress is distributed as an open source content management system.
• WordPress code is continually worked on by volunteers. People from all around the world are at work developing and improving WordPress functionality every day.
• The WordPress core software is updated on a regular basis to fix bugs and improve both its usage and security.
• WordPress delivers content online to visitors worldwide. WordPress has been translated and localized into over seventy languages.
• The WordPress repository currently makes available thousands of free WP plugins, themes, and widgets to WordPress users.
• There is virtually no limit to what type of site you can build using WordPress.

WordPress CMS Popularity

A content management system (CMS), is a web tool for non-technical users. It is designed to make it easier for non-technical website owners to add, modify 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 become the most downloaded self-hosted CMS-based publishing platform in the world, used on millions of sites 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 its distributed model and having so few employees, WordPress.com (the hosted version of the WordPress software) currently attracts more unique monthly views than Facebook, Amazon, eBay, Twitter, and Yahoo …

(WordPress.com unique visits. Source: http://automattic.com/about)

Consider the following stats on WordPress:

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

(WordPress usage stats. 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 now using the WordPress CMS application.

WordPress is so popular, that keeping up with the latest statistics on WordPress is very difficult because the numbers change so frequently.

For example, at the time this article was published, 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 recent version of WordPress. Around one third of all current users have not yet upgraded their installations to the latest version …

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

Even as this article 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 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.

Regarding updates, WordPress has made available to users over 100 new software updates since 2003 …

(Over 100 new versions of WordPress have been released since 2003)

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

(WordPress regularly releases new software updates named after famous Jazz musicians)

Curiously enough, all major WordPress version releases are traditionally named after Jazz musicians, eg:

• v.1.2 = Charles Mingus (May 22, 2004),
• v.2.6 = McCoy Tyner (July 15, 2008),
• v.3.1 = Django Reinhardt (February 23, 2011),
• v.3.6 = Oscar Peterson (August 1, 2013),
• v.4.1 = Dinah Washington (December 18, 2014),
• etc …

Who Uses WordPress?

A better question is who doesn’t use WordPress? All different types of companies and people from all walks of life are using WordPress to publish content about everything and anything.

Global corporations, businesses, technology companies, celebrities, politicians, famous artists, educational institutions, government sectors, not-for-profits – even nations use WordPress to run their official sites …

WP Showcase

Here are just some of the sites, companies and people who have built their online presence with WordPress:

• Global Brands & Companies: Aqua Hotels and Resorts, Public Storage Canada, Panic, McDonald’s Singapore, Mercedes-Benz, etc …
• Celebs, Politicians, Sports Stars, Artists & Musicians: US Air Force General Chuck Yeager, Rush, Pixies, Beyoncé, The Sacramento Ballet, Snoop Dogg, Kobe Bryant, Gabriel Iglesias, Russell Brand, etc …
• Colleges & Educational Institutions: Nicholls State University, Stony Brook University School of Journalism, Washington University’s School of Law, Salve Regina University, etc.
• Magazines & Media: Tribune Media, New York Post, IMC TV, LinkedIn, 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 application (WordPress.com) and as a self-hosted, downloadable software (WordPress.org).

• Businesses often choose the self-hosted version, which can be installed in their domain names 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 posts per second (around 1.5 million posts per day).

You can see a live map that lets you see blog post updates around the world in real-time …

WordPress (Hosted Version) – Live Users WorldWide

In other posts, we will look at the main differences between WordPress.com (hosted) and WordPress.org (self-hosted) versions.

General Statistics About WordPress

WordPress Plugins

WordPress users can download and install over 37,000 WP plugins for free …

(WordPress plugin repository)

For a detailed article about plugins go here:

• Add New Functionality To Your Web Site With WP Plugins

WordPress Themes

WordPress users can also access over 1,700 themes for free …

(WordPress.org theme directory)

We have written a great article about WP themes here:

• About WP Themes – A Guide For Business Owners

Translations Of WordPress

WordPress has been translated and localized into over seventy languages in addition to English …

(WordPress.org languages)

WordPress Searches

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

(WP searches online)

If you compare searches for WordPress to other CMS platforms, WordPress is searched online 5 x more than Joomla and nine times more than Drupal.

WordPress Rates

According to WordPress’ own “State of the Word” 2014 survey, a quarter of WordPress users who participated in the survey said that they make a full-time living off the WordPress CMS. An earlier survey conducted by WordPress (2012) also found that the average hourly rate of WordPress projects is US$50.

You can find WordPress developers and designers for hire at freelancing sites like Upwork …

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

(Source: Upwork.com)

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

In other articles, we will explore the following areas of WordPress in great detail:

• Why WordPress is the best platform to grow your small business online,
• Dozens of compelling reasons why you should choose WordPress for your business website or blog, including a detailed look at the benefits, features, and advantages of using the WordPress CMS platform,
• Ways to automate your business marketing with WordPress,
• How to drive more visitors to your website, get more leads, and sell more products and services with WordPress.
• Plus, we’ll provide lots of ”how to” tutorials and examples of how to use WordPress to grow your business online, while also saving thousands of dollars on the costs of website development and web design.

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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://wptrainme.com
• 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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