WordPress – Useful Facts And Statistics

This blog post is part of a comprehensive article series aimed at helping you understand why the WordPress CMS can help your business succeed online with the WordPress platform.

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

• WordPress For Small Business Owners – A Beginner’s Guide To Building A Successful Small Business Using WordPress

In this article, you will learn some impressive WordPress usage statistics that will help you understand why millions of businesses around the world use WordPress to power their websites and blogs and what kind of people and businesses are using WordPress today.

WordPress Statistics

Below is a summary of what this blog post will cover:

• WordPress began as a blogging tool in 2003.
• WordPress is available in two formats: a hosted application (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 site.
• There are over 60 million installations of WordPress worldwide. This number is growing every day.
• WordPress powers almost 27% of the internet. Over one-fifth of all websites worldwide 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 content management system are driven by WordPress.
• Over 35,000,000 searches are made on Google each month for WordPress related terms.
• WordPress is completely 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 application is regularly updated to fix bugs and improve both its features and security.
• WordPress can deliver your content online to visitors worldwide. WordPress has been translated and localized into over 70 international languages.
• The WordPress repository currently makes available thousands of free WordPress plugins, themes, and widgets to WordPress users.
• There is virtually no limit to what you can do with WordPress.

WordPress Popularity

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

WordPress began in 2003. It was originally written by Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little. It is currently the widely-used self-hosted blogging tool 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 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 Facebook, Amazon, Yahoo, eBay, and Twitter …

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

Consider the following WP CMS usage stats:

Over 60% of websites worldwide are not CMS-based. Of those that are, WordPress is the clear leader, with more than 60% of all market share.

WordPress usage statistics

In terms of CMS market share, no other platform even comes close to WordPress …

In fact, more websites and blogs today are powered by the WordPress CMS application.

*** UPDATE ***

As of June 2017, around 30% of all CMS websites in the world are built using WordPress.

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WordPress is so popular, that even trying to keep up with statistics on WordPress is very difficult because the information changes so often.

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 recently released version of WordPress. Less than half of all current users have upgraded their WP installations to the latest release …

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

As this article was being written, the number of downloads had already increased. If you click on the link above and visit the WordPress download counter site, you should expect to see a much higher download figure … perhaps even a newer version, as the WordPress development team continually updates the software to fix security issues and bugs, and improve or add new features.

Speaking of updates, WordPress has made available to users over one hundred new software versions to date …

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

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

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

An interesting fact, is that all major WordPress releases have a tradition of being named in honor of well-known Jazz music artists, eg:

• v.2.0 = Duke Ellington (December 31, 2005),
• v.2.3 = Dexter Gordon (September 24, 2007),
• v.3.2 = George Gershwin (July 4, 2011),
• v.3.5 = Elvin Jones (December 11, 2012),
• v.3.9 = Jimmy Smith (April 16, 2014),
• etc …

Who Is Using WordPress

Who doesn’t use WordPress? All different types of organizations and people from all walks of life are using WordPress to blog about every kind of topic imaginable.

Giant brands, business of all sizes, retail companies, celebrities, politicians, famous artists, colleges, government department sites, not-for-profits – even nations use WordPress to publish web content and run their official websites and blogs …

WordPress.org Website Showcase

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

• Global Brands & Corporations: Sony Music, Glad, GDF SUEZ, McDonald’s Singapore, Hyatt Blog, etc …
• Famous People, Politicians, Sports Stars, Artists & Musicians: US Air Force General Chuck Yeager, Narendra Modi, Prime Minister of India, The Meredith Vieira Show, Beyoncé, The Sacramento Ballet, Steve Blake, LA Lakers, Dave Matthews Band, Howie Mandel, Jason Mraz, etc …
• Universities & Educational Institutions: Georgia State University, Milwaukee School of Engineering’s Bridge, Bates College, Carleton University, etc.
• Magazines & Online Media: Time Inc., The Australian, FiveThirtyEight, Enterprise Magazine, etc.
• Governments, Not For Profits & Community Organizations: Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African Art, Canadian Olympic Committee, Slow Food Italia, UK Government Cabinet Office Digital Team, Rotary Means Business – Rotary Club, etc.

Earlier, we mentioned that WordPress offers users two formats: a hosted platform (WordPress.com) and as a self-hosted, downloadable application (WordPress.org).

• Businesses 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 activities.
• 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 posts every 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.com – Activity

In later articles, we will present 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 WP plugins for free from the WordPress plugins repository …

(WordPress.org plugin directory)

For a detailed article about plugins see this post:

• WP Plugins Extend Your Web Site’s Features

WordPress Themes

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

(WP themes directory)

We have published a comprehensive article about WordPress themes here:

• A Handy Guide To Understanding WordPress Themes

WordPress Translations

WordPress has been translated and localized into over 70 languages and dialects in addition to English …

(WP languages)

WordPress Searches

The search term “WordPress” alone receives around 2.7 million searches per month on Google. Adding WordPress-related terms (e.g. “WordPress themes”, “WP plugins”, ”learn WordPress”, etc. brings the total number of online searches for WordPress terms to more than 30 million …

(WP-related searches online)

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

WordPress Developers

According to WordPress’ own “State of the Word” 2014 survey, a quarter of all 33,000 WordPress users who answered the survey stated 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 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 WordPress job cost ranges are around $10 – $500 …

(Source: Upwork.com)

As you can clearly see, there is no end in sight for how much further WordPress can continue to grow.

In other articles, you will learn:

• Why WordPress is an ideal platform for growing your business online,
• Dozens of compelling 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 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 publishing loads of step-by-step tutorials and examples on how you can use WordPress and grow your business presence online, and save thousands of dollars on web 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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