WordPress – Useful Facts And Statistics

This article is part of a comprehensive multi-part article series designed to help small businesses grow and succeed online.

For an overview of the article series, go here:

• A Beginner’s Guide To Growing A Successful Small Business With A WordPress Blog

In this article, we present some impressive WordPress statistics 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: Usage And Popularity

The brief version:

• WordPress began in 2003.
• WordPress offers two formats: a hosted platform (WordPress.com) and as a self-hosted, downloadable application (WordPress.org).
• 23 out of every one hundred new domains registered in the U.S. are for a new WordPress site.
• There are well over 60 million installations of WordPress. This number grows significantly everyday.
• WordPress powers over 30% of the internet. Over one-third of all websites around the world are driven 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 that use a content management system are powered by WordPress.
• Over 37 million searches are made on Google each month for WordPress related terms.
• The WordPress application is completely free to download, use and modify. The WordPress application is distributed as an open source content management system.
• WordPress is built by volunteers. Thousands of people from all around the world work on developing and improving the WordPress application on an ongoing basis.
• The WordPress software is continually being updated to eliminate 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 and dialects.
• The WordPress repository currently makes available thousands of free WP plugins, themes, and widgets to WordPress users.
• There is practically no limit to what you can do with WordPress.

WordPress Market Dominance

In simple terms, a content management system (CMS), is a website maintenance tool for non-technical users. It is designed to make it easy for non-technical website users to add, modify and manage all content on their website.

WordPress began in 2003. It was originally written by Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little. WordPress is now 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 are home-based. Despite its distributed model and having so few employees, WordPress.com (the hosted version of WordPress) currently attracts more unique views per month than Amazon, Facebook, eBay, Twitter, and Yahoo …

(WordPress.com unique visitors. Source: Automattic.com)

Consider the following statistics on WordPress CMS usage:

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 websites and blogs are powered by the WordPress CMS application.

WordPress is so popular, that trying to keep up with statistics on WordPress is difficult because the numbers change so frequently.

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

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

Note: The above number 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)

Even as this post was being written, the number of downloads is already increasing. If you click on the link above and visit the WordPress download counter page, expect to see a significantly higher download number … perhaps even a different 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 released over one hundred new software versions in its first 11 years of existence …

(Over 100 new WordPress versions have been made available since 2003)

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

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

An interesting fact, is that all major WordPress releases are traditionally named in honor of famous Jazz musicians, eg:

• v.2.0 = Duke Ellington (December 31, 2005),
• v.2.7 = John Coltrane (December 10, 2008),
• v.2.9 = Carmen McRae (December 18, 2009),
• v.3.3 = Sonny Stitt (December 12, 2011),
• v.4.0 = Benny Goodman (September 4, 2014),
• etc …

Who Is Using WordPress

A better question is who doesn’t use WordPress? All types of organizations and people are using WordPress to blog about everything under the sun.

Global corporations, businesses, technology companies, celebrities, sports stars, famous artists, universities, government department sites, not-for-profits – even nations are using WordPress to run their official websites and blogs …

WP Blog Showcase

Here are just some of the growing number of businesses, organizations and people who have chosen to build their online presence with WordPress:

• Businesses & Corporations: Sony Music, DC Diaper Bank, Method Products, Groupe Vivendi, Mercedes-Benz, etc …
• Celebs, Politicians, Sports Stars, Artists & Musicians: Garth Brooks, Narendra Modi, Prime Minister of India, Lily Allen, Brian Smith, Dallas Mavericks, Snoop Dogg, Dave Matthews Band, Channing Tatum, Russell Brand, etc …
• Universities & Educational Institutions: Georgia State University, International Relations Online at American University, Bates College, Carleton University, etc.
• Magazines & Media: Tribune Media, The Australian, FiveThirtyEight, CBS New York, etc.
• Government Sites, Not For Profits & Community Organizations: Sweden’s Official Site, Canadian Museum of History, São Paulo Carnival, 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 prefer to download the self-hosted version, which can be installed on their own domain and customized 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 self-hosted WordPress sites) published on average 17 new posts per second (around 1.5 million per day).

You can see a live map that shows user activity across its hosted platform …

WordPress (Hosted Version) – Live Users WorldWide

In other tutorials, we discuss the difference between WordPress.com (hosted) vs WordPress.org (self-hosted) versions.

Other WordPress Statistics

WordPress Plugins

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

(WP plugin repository)

We have written a great article about WordPress plugins here:

• Add New Functionality To Your Website With Plugins

WordPress Themes

WordPress users can also access over 1,700 free WP themes from the WordPress themes repository …

(WordPress.org theme repository)

For more information about themes go here:

• About WordPress Themes – A Beginner’s Guide

Translations Of WordPress

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

(WordPress.org languages)

WordPress Searches Online

The search term “WordPress” alone receives around 2.7 million monthly searches on Google. Adding WordPress-related terms (e.g. “WP themes”, “WP plugins”, ”learn WordPress”, 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 five times more than Joomla and nine times more often than Drupal.

WordPress Rates

According to WordPress’ own “State of the Word” 2014 survey, a quarter of all WP users who responded to 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 around US$50.

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

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

(Source: Upwork)

As you can see from the facts and figures above, the growth of WordPress is predicted to continue for a long time to come.

In other articles, you will learn:

• Why WordPress is an ideal vehicle for growing your business online,
• Dozens of reasons why you should choose WordPress for your website or blog, including a comprehensive breakdown of the unique benefits, features, and advantages of using the WordPress CMS platform,
• How to automate your business marketing with WordPress,
• How to generate targeted traffic, get more leads and subscribers, and how to sell more products and services with WordPress.
• Plus, we’ll be regularly posting loads of step-by-step tutorials and actual examples and tips of how you can use WordPress to grow your business online, and save thousands of dollars on the costs of website development and website design.

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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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