WordPress – Useful Facts And Statistics

This article is part of a detailed article series aimed at helping business owners and non-technical users succeed online using the WordPress content publishing software.

For an overview of the article series, see this post:

• Using WordPress To Grow A Successful Business

In this blog post, we present a number of impressive WordPress facts and figures that will help you understand why millions of businesses around the world choose WordPress and what kind of people and businesses are using WordPress today.

Statistics And Usage About WordPress

Below is a summary of what this article will cover:

• WordPress began in 2003.
• WordPress is available as a hosted application (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 installing a new WordPress website or blog.
• There are well over sixty million installations of WordPress. 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 sites worldwide using a content management system are powered by WordPress.
• Over 35,000,000 searches made each month on Google are for WordPress related terms.
• The WordPress application is 100% free to download, use and modify. WordPress is built using an open source content management system.
• WordPress is built by volunteers. People from all over the world are at work developing and improving WordPress each day.
• The WordPress core software is updated on a regular basis to address bugs and improve both its usage and security.
• WordPress can deliver your content online to visitors worldwide. WordPress has been translated and localized into over seventy international languages.
• WordPress currently makes available thousands of free WordPress plugins, themes, and widgets to WordPress users.
• There is virtually no limit to what can be built with WordPress.

WordPress CMS Usage

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, edit and manage all content on their website.

WordPress began in 2003. It was originally written by Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little. Since then, WordPress has become the most downloaded 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 work from home. Despite its distributed model and so few employees, WordPress.com (the hosted version of the software) currently attracts more unique views per month than Facebook, Amazon, eBay, Twitter, and Yahoo …

(WordPress.com monthly uniques. Source: http://automattic.com/about)

Consider the following figures on WordPress:

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

(WordPress 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 and more sites today are being built on WordPress.

WordPress is so popular, that keeping up with the latest statistics on WordPress is difficult because the data changes so often.

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 numbers represents only the latest version of WordPress. Around one third of all current users have not yet upgraded their installations to the latest version …

(WordPress versions currently in use. Source: https://wordpress.org/about/stats)

Even as this article was being written, the number of downloads has already grown. If you were to click on the link above and visit the WordPress download counter site, expect to see a much higher number of downloads … 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 100 new update versions in its first 11 years of existence …

(Over one hundred new WordPress versions have been made available to date)

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

(WordPress regularly releases new software updates honoring famous Jazz musicians)

Interestingly enough, all major WordPress updates are traditionally named after well-known Jazz music artists, eg:

• v.2.1 = Ella Fitzgerald (January 22, 2007),
• 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.4.1 = Dinah Washington (December 18, 2014),
• etc …

Who Uses WordPress?

A better question is who doesn’t use WordPress nowadays? All different types of companies and people use WordPress to publish content about everything and anything.

Popular corporations, business of all sizes, retail companies, celebrities, politicians, famous artists, educational institutions, government sectors, not-for-profits – even countries use WordPress blogs …

WordPress Showcase

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

• Global Brands & Corporations: Google Ventures, Public Storage Canada, GDF SUEZ, Groupe Vivendi, Vogue, etc …
• Celebrities, Politicians, Sports Stars, Artists & Musicians: Alanis Morissette, Narendra Modi, Prime Minister of India, Pixies, Beyoncé, The Sacramento Ballet, The Rolling Stones, Mötley Crüe, Channing Tatum, Russell Brand, etc …
• Universities & Educational Institutions: Nicholls State University, Stony Brook University School of Journalism, UCF College of Medicine, The University of Mary Washington, etc.
• Magazines & Media: Tribune Media, The Australian, Facebook Newsroom, Enterprise Magazine, etc.
• Governments, Public Services & Humanitarian 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 offers users the choice of two formats: a hosted application (WordPress.com) and as a self-hosted, downloadable application (WordPress.org).

• Businesses prefer the self-hosted version, which can be installed on their domain names and customized to suit their needs. In fact, most WordPress self-hosted installations are used for business sites.
• 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 new blog posts per second (around 1.5 million per day).

You can see a live map showing the latest activity across its hosted service …

WordPress (Hosted Version) – Activity

In later articles, we explain the difference between WordPress.com (hosted) and WordPress.org (self-hosted) versions.

Other WordPress Statistics

WordPress Plugins

WordPress users can download and install over almost 40,000 free plugins from the WordPress free plugin repository …

(WP plugin directory)

We have published a detailed article about plugins here:

• Using WP Plugins To Improve Your Site’s Functionality

WordPress Themes

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

(WordPress.org themes directory)

We have written a comprehensive article about WordPress themes here:

• A Handy Guide To WordPress Themes

WordPress In Other Languages

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

(WP language translations)

WordPress Searches Online

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

(WordPress searches online)

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

WordPress Services

According to WordPress’ own “State of the Word” 2014 survey, a quarter of 33,000 users who answered 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 average hourly rate of WordPress projects is around US$50.

You can find WordPress designers and developers for hire by searching on freelancing sites like Upwork …

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

(Source: Upwork)

As you can see, WordPress is set for continued growth for a long time to come.

In other blog posts, we will address the following areas of WordPress:

• Why WordPress is the smartest option when it comes to choosing a platform to grow your business online,
• Over 50 great reasons why you should choose WordPress for your website or blog, including a comprehensive breakdown of the benefits, features, and advantages of using WordPress,
• Ways to automate your business marketing with WordPress,
• How to drive more traffic to your site, get more leads, and how to sell more products and services with WordPress.
• Plus, we’ll be publishing lots of tutorials and tips on how to use WordPress and expand your business online, and save thousands of dollars on website development and web design costs.

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References:

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://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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