WordPress powers one in every four websites you visit online. Huge, right? It’s safe to say WordPress is no longer just a blogging tool – it’s by far the most popular content management system online and we’ve got the numbers to back it up.
If you’ve ever had trouble convincing clients WordPress isn’t just for bloggers, here are 13 facts that proves its dominance – and are worth sharing at your next client meeting.
1. WordPress Powers 25.5% of the Web
WordPress’ remarkable growth isn’t slowing down any time soon. WordPress hit 20% usage just two years ago and if that trend is set to continue, we could see WordPress reach its next milestone, 30%, in 2017.
In October, 29.7% of all new sites used WordPress.
2. WordPress Powers 30.3% of the Top 1000 Websites
If you don’t think that figure is impressive, consider this: using a standard CMS is not very common among the top 1000 sites, and more than 90% of them are using custom solutions. That 30.3% has some weight behind it now, huh?
Drupal comes in second with 19.7% and Adobe Experience Manager this with 11.8%.
3. WordPress is the Most Popular CMS
Among the 300+ content management systems that web technology survey service W3Techs routinely monitors, WordPress dominates with a whopping 58.7% market share.
It’s worth noting that 57% of websites don’t use any identifiable CMS, so there’s still a lot of room for WordPress to further make its mark.
4. WordPress is the Fastest Growing CMS
Every 74 seconds a site within the top 10 million starts using WordPress. Compare this with Shopify, the second-fastest growing CMS, which gains a new site every 22 minutes.
5. WordPress Powers Some of the World’s Biggest Brands and Names
These include Sony, Microsoft, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Time Magazine, The New Yorker, Mashable, TechCrunch, Coca Cola, Mercedes Benz, Samsung, Star Wars, PlayStation, General Motors, NFL, Bloomberg, MTV, Facebook, eBay, Google, LinkedIn, Flickr, NASA, and TED.
Then there’s Jay Z, Beyoncé, Katy Perry, Justin Timberlake, Kobe Bryant, The Rolling Stones, Malala Yousafzai, Sylvester Stallone, just to name a few.
WordPress.com’s VIP service hosts many of these brands and names. WordPress.org also showcases some of the Fortune 500 companies that use the CMS.
6. There Have Been 143 versions of WordPress to Date
This figure includes both major and minor (security, maintenance etc.) releases.
Volunteers all over the world contribute to the WordPress project, ensuring it is regularly and continually updated to improve both its functionality and security. WordPress 4.4 alone had 471 contributors.
The latest version, WordPress 4.4, has been downloaded more than 6.5 million times since it was released just three weeks ago.
7. WordPress is Available to Download in 57 Languages
WordPress can deliver your content to visitors worldwide in a variety of languages. If English isn’t your native tongue, you can download WordPress in Bengali, Danish, Esperanto, and Icelandic, just to name a few of the translations on offer.
If the language you prefer isn’t available, it probably will be soon – the WordPress translation team has almost finished translating the CMS into 12 other languages, with even more translations underway.
According to W3Techs, 37.3% of English language websites use WordPress, while usage numbers are between 38% and 40% for Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish and Turkish sites, and they reach 51.3% for Bengali and 54.4% for Bosnian.
8. There Are 42,000+ Plugins for WordPress
And that’s just the plugins you can download for free. There are more than 100 premium plugins on our site, another 4000+ hosted over at CodeCanyon, any many developers release their own plugins for free on GitHub or on their personal websites.
With many thousands of plugins available, there’s no end to how you can extend and expand the functionality of WordPress.
9. Tuesday is the Most Popular Day for Downloading WordPress
According to WP Central, users are more likely to download WordPress on a Tuesday than any other day of the week. Saturday is the least popular day.
10. WordPress.com Gets More Monthly Visitors Than Apple
On average, WordPress.com receives visits from 35,910,572 people each month, compared to less than half that number, 16,837,476, at apple.com. To put it into perspective, that’s the population of Canada inundating WordPress.com monthly to start new blogs, write new posts, or visit existing sites.
11. WordPress Developers Earn $50 an Hour
In his 2012 State of the Word, WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg revealed 6,800 self-employed people had built more than 170,000 sites personally, and charged a median hourly rate of $50. If each site took only 3 hours to make, that’s $29.5M of work at the average hourly rate. Combine that with data from the 2014 State of the Word, which showed a quarter of the people who filled in the annual WordPress Survey make a full-time living off the CMS.
Over at Quora, WordPress contributor Mark Jaquith puts the $50 figure into perspective, saying a “WordPress consultant” could be someone who can copy-paste some basic theme modification for $30-$60 an hour, to someone who can code a plugin from scratch ($80-$150 an hour), to high-end consulting on performance, security, scaling and deployment ($200+ an hour).
Freelancer, a popular outsourcing marketplace, lists 739,794 WordPress developers worldwide and reports 393,250 projects have been completed, worth $71,020,304.
Upwork lists “WordPress” as one of its top skills, with an average project cost of $194 and an average project duration of 5+ weeks.
According to SimplyHired, the average salary for “WordPress jobs” is $40,000.
12. 18 New WordPress Posts Every Second
In an average month, bloggers who use WordPress.com or have Jetpack installed on a self-hosted setup post 53.1 million new posts. That’s 1.7 million new posts every day, 71,000 every hour or about 1000 every minute.
All up, bloggers produce 43.5 million new comments each month.
Traffic-wise, more than 409 million people view more than 20.3 billion WordPress.com pages each month.
13. WordPress Takes Care of 80-90% of Google’s Crawling Issues
According to Matt Cutts, the former head of Google’s web spam team, sites built with WordPress are capable of ranking higher in search results because the CMS takes care of 80-90% of Google’s crawling issues.
That’s most of the hard work done so you don’t have to worry about the small things and you can get on with creating quality content for your site.
Do you share any other WordPress stats and facts with clients? Have we missed any of your favourite stats? Let us know in the comments below.
