This article is part of a series of articles aimed at helping you succeed online.
For an overview of the article series, see this post:
In this blog post, you will learn some WordPress facts and figures that will help you understand why millions of businesses around the world use WordPress to power their websites and what kind of businesses and people are using WordPress today.
Impressive Statistics About WordPress
The short version:
- WordPress started as a blogging tool in 2003.
- WordPress offers users the choice of two formats: a hosted platform (WordPress.com) and as a self-hosted, downloadable software (WordPress.org).
- 23 out of every hundred new domains registered in the U.S. are for a new WordPress website or blog.
- There are well over 60 million installations of WordPress. This number grows 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 CMS application are powered by WordPress.
- Over 35 million searches are made on Google each month for terms related to WordPress.
- The WordPress application is completely free to download, use and modify. WordPress is distributed as 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 the WordPress application on an ongoing basis.
- The WordPress core program 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 international languages.
- WordPress currently makes available thousands of free plugins, themes, and widgets to WordPress users.
- There is practically no limit to what someone can do 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 users to add, edit and manage content on their website.
WordPress began in 2003. It was originally written by Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little. WordPress is now 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 work from home. Despite its distributed model and having so few employees, WordPress.com (the hosted version of the software) currently attracts more unique monthly views than Amazon, Facebook, Yahoo, Twitter, and eBay …
(WordPress [hosted] unique visits. Source: Automattic.com)
Consider the following WP usage figures:
WordPress is the world’s leading CMS platform and powers over 30% of the web …
(WP CMS 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 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 information changes so often.
For example, at the time this article was published, here is the number of downloads of the latest WordPress version …
(Source: https://wordpress.org/download/counter)
Note: The above number represents only the latest version of WordPress. Around one third of all current users have not yet updated their WP installations to the latest version …
(WordPress versions currently in use. Source: https://wordpress.org/about/stats)
As this article was being written, the number of downloads has already shot up. If you were to click on the link above and visit the WordPress download counter page, you should expect to see a significantly higher figure … perhaps even an updated version, as the WordPress 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 since 2003 …
(Over one hundred new WordPress versions have been made available in its first 11 years)
WordPress currently releases a new software version every 3-4 months or so …
(WordPress regularly releases new version updates named after famous Jazz musicians)
Curiously enough, all major WordPress upgrades are traditionally named in honor of famous Jazz musicians, 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.3.7 = Count Basie (October 24, 2013),
- v.4.0 = Benny Goodman (September 4, 2014),
- etc …
Who Uses WordPress?
In a nutshell, all different types of businesses and people from all walks of life are using WordPress to publish content about every kind of topic imaginable.
Popular corporations, business of all sizes, technology companies, celebrities, politicians, famous artists, colleges, government department sites, not-for-profits – even nations are using WordPress sites …
WP Showcase
Here are just some of the sites, institutions and people using WordPress:
- Businesses & Corporations: Google Ventures, DC Diaper Bank, GDF SUEZ, Groupe Vivendi, Vogue, etc …
- Celebs, Politicians, Sports Stars, Actors & Musicians: Garth Brooks, Narendra Modi, Prime Minister of India, Lily Allen, Brian Smith, The Sacramento Ballet, Steve Blake, LA Lakers, Katie Couric, Howie Mandel, Sylvester Stallone, etc …
- Colleges & Educational Institutions: University of Manitoba Today, Milwaukee School of Engineering’s Bridge, Washington University’s School of Law, The University of Mary Washington, etc.
- Magazines & Media: Thrive Magazine, The New Yorker, InStyle News, Dusty Cartridge, etc.
- Governments, Public Services & Community Organizations: San Pellegrino Terme, Canadian Museum of History, Maryland National Road Association, AIDS Project Rhode Island, 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 clearly prefer the self-hosted version, which can be installed in their own domain names and freely 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 self-hosted WordPress sites) published on average 17 new blog posts per second (around 1.5 million posts per day).
WordPress provides a live map that shows the latest user activity across its hosted platform …
WordPress (Hosted Version) – Activity Around The World
In later posts, we will examine the differences between WordPress.com (hosted) vs WordPress.org (self-hosted) versions.
Other Statistics About WordPress
WordPress Plugins
WordPress users can download and install over 37,000 WordPress plugins at no cost from the WordPress plugins directory …
(WordPress.org free plugins directory)
For a detailed article about WordPress plugins see this post:
WordPress Themes
WordPress users can also access over 1,700 free themes …
(WordPress.org theme repository)
For a detailed article about themes see this post:
Translations Of WordPress
WordPress has been translated and localized into over 70 international languages in addition to English …
(WP language translations)
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”, ”learn WordPress”, etc. brings the total number of searches online for WordPress terms to more than thirty million …
(WordPress-related searches online)
If you compare searches for WordPress to other CMS platforms, WordPress is searched online five times as much as Joomla and 9x more often than Drupal.
WordPress Rates
According to WordPress’ own “State of the Word” 2014 survey, a quarter of all 33,000 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 average hourly rate of WordPress projects is around US$50.
You can find WordPress developers and designers for hire at freelancing sites like Upwork.com …
According to Upwork.com, the typical cost for WordPress jobs is around $10 – $500 …
(Source: Upwork)
As you can clearly see from the statistics presented above, the dominance of WordPress is expected to continue for a long time to come.
In other articles, we will address the following areas of WordPress in more detail:
- Why WordPress is the best vehicle for growing your small business online,
- Over 50 great reasons why you should choose WordPress for your business website or blog, including a detailed look at the benefits, features, and advantages of using WordPress,
- How to automate your business with WordPress,
- How to generate targeted visitors to your website, get more leads and subscribers, and how to sell more products and services with WordPress.
- Plus, we’ll be regularly posting lots of ”how to” tutorials and actual tips of how to use WordPress and expand your business online, and save thousands of dollars on website development and website design costs.
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References:
The above figures 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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