WordPress – Useful Facts And Statistics

This blog post is part of an article series aimed at helping you grow a successful business online with WordPress.

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

• Everything You Need To Know To Grow A Successful Small Business Using WordPress

In this article, we present some surprising WordPress statistics that will help you understand why millions of businesses around the world rely on WordPress and what kind of businesses are using WordPress today.

Some Facts And Figures About WordPress

Below is a summary of what you will learn in this article:

• WordPress started in 2003.
• WordPress is available as a hosted application (WordPress.com) and as a self-hosted, downloadable software (WordPress.org).
• 23 out of every 100 new domains registered in the U.S. are for installing a new WordPress website or blog.
• There are over 60 million installations of WordPress worldwide. 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 websites worldwide that use a CMS application are built with WordPress.
• Over 37 million searches are made on Google each month for terms related to WordPress.
• WordPress is completely free to download, use and modify. The WordPress application is built using an open source content management system.
• WordPress is built and improved upon by volunteers. People from all over the world are at work developing and improving WordPress functionality on an ongoing basis.
• The WordPress software is updated on a regular basis to eliminate bugs and improve its usage and security.
• WordPress can deliver your content online to visitors worldwide. WordPress has been translated and localized into over 70 international languages and dialects.
• The WordPress repository currently makes available thousands of free WordPress plugins, themes, and widgets to WordPress users.
• There is almost no limit to what you can build with WordPress.

WordPress Market Share

A content management system (CMS), is a website maintenance tool for non-technical users. It is a web application designed to make it easy for non-technical website owners to add, modify and manage all content on their site.

WordPress began in 2003. It was originally written by Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little. Since then, WordPress has grown to become the most downloaded self-hosted CMS application 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 being a distributed company with so few employees, WordPress.com (the hosted version of WordPress) currently attracts more unique views per month than Amazon, Facebook, Yahoo, Twitter, and eBay …

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

Here are just some of the latest WordPress usage statistics:

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

(WordPress 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 and more sites today are powered by the WordPress CMS application.

WordPress is so popular, that even trying to keep up with statistics on WordPress is very 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 download numbers represents only the most recently released version of WordPress. Around one third of all current users have not yet upgraded their installations to the latest version …

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

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, expect to see a significantly 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.

Speaking of updates, WordPress has made available over 100 new update versions to date …

(Over one hundred new versions of WordPress have been made available since 2003)

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

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

An interesting fact, is that all major WordPress version releases have a tradition of being named after 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.4.0 = Benny Goodman (September 4, 2014),
• etc …

Who Is Using WordPress

A better question is who isn’t using WordPress nowadays? All different types of companies and people from all walks of life are using WordPress to publish content about every kind of topic imaginable.

Giant brands, businesses, retail companies, celebrities, politicians, famous artists, universities, government department sites, not-for-profits – even countries are using WordPress-powered sites …

WordPress Showcase

Here are just some of the many sites, companies and people using WordPress:

• Global Brands & Companies: Aqua Hotels and Resorts, Boardshorts.com, Method Products, Group Bouygues, Mercedes-Benz, etc …
• Famous People, Politicians, Sports Stars, Artists & Musicians: US Air Force General Chuck Yeager, Narendra Modi, Prime Minister of India, Pixies, Justin Bieber, Dallas Mavericks, Riverdance, Blondie, Channing Tatum, Russell Brand, etc …
• Universities & Educational Institutions: Nicholls State University, Milwaukee School of Engineering’s Bridge, Bates College, Salve Regina University, etc.
• Magazines & Online Media: Tribune Media, New York Post, IMC TV, Enterprise Magazine, etc.
• Government Sites, Not For Profits & Humanitarian Organizations: Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African Art, Canadian Museum of History, São Paulo Carnival, CURE International, Amnesty International Korea, etc.

Earlier, we mentioned that WordPress is available as 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 domain names and modified 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 that are part of the WordPress network (blogs hosted either on WordPress.com or externally-hosted WordPress sites) published on average 17 new blog posts every second (around 1.5 million posts per day).

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

WordPress (Hosted Version) – Activity Around The World

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

Other WordPress Statistics

WordPress Plugins

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

(WordPress.org plugin directory)

We have published a detailed article about WP plugins here:

• Add New Functionality To Your WP Web Site With Plugins

WordPress Themes

WordPress users can also download and install over 1,700 themes for free …

(WordPress.org theme repository)

For more information about WP themes see this post:

• A Basic Guide To Understanding WordPress Themes

Using WordPress In Different Languages

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

(WP languages)

Searching Online For WordPress

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

(WP searches online)

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

WordPress Services

According to WordPress’ own “State of the Word” 2014 survey, one quarter of all 33,000 users who participated in the survey said 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 developers and designers for hire by searching on freelancing sites like Upwork.com …

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

(Source: Upwork)

As you can see, WordPress is set for continued growth for many years to come.

In other articles, you will learn:

• Why WordPress is the best vehicle to grow your business online,
• Dozens of reasons why you should choose WordPress for your website or blog, including a detailed breakdown of the benefits, features, and advantages of using the WordPress CMS platform,
• How to automate your business with WordPress,
• How to drive targeted traffic, get more leads and subscribers, and sell more products and services with WordPress.
• Plus, we’ll be publishing loads of step-by-step tutorials and tips on how to use WordPress to expand your business presence online, while also saving thousands of dollars on website 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://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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