There’s no disputing the fact that
WordPress is by far the most prominent CMS out there. The brainchild of Matt
Mullenweg and Mike Little, WordPress has risen to superstardom in the
blogosphere in the 11 short years since it was released.
You might be thinking that you
already know just how popular WordPress really is. Think again, because these
14 WordPress usage statistics may well give you pause for thought.
1.
48% of Technorati’s Top 100 Blogs Are Managed With WordPress
When you consider that there are is
an enormous amount of alternative content manage systems available, this
statistic speaks volumes about WordPress popularity.
If you decide to go with WordPress,
you will definitely be with good company. The New York Times, CNN, Mashable,
and eBay all run their blogs on the most popular CMS in the world – WordPress.
2.
74.6 Million Sites Depend on WordPress
Yep, you read that right. 74,652,825
sites out there are depending on good ol’ WordPress. That’s one site per person
in Turkey.
Around 50% of this figure (close to
37 million) is hosted on the free WordPress.com. In the realm of self-hosted
sites, WordPress accounts for 18.9% of all websites. That’s even more
astounding when you consider that over 70% of sites worldwide do not use a
CMS.
3.
WordPress-Related Keywords Score 37 Million Searches Per Month
The keyword “WordPress” alone
receives over 450,000 exact match searches every month. That’s just
“WordPress”, not “WordPress help” or “WordPress plugins” or anything of the sort.
When you count the searches of all
keywords with WordPress or WP (a common abbreviation for WordPress) in them,
the monthly figure is a whopping 37 million searches. Assuming that this figure
remains constant, WordPress will get 444 million searches in 2014. That’s
nearly one and a half times the population of the U.S.
WordPress is searched five times as
much as Joomla and nine times more often than Drupal.
4.
40 Translations of WordPress
While the actual number isn’t half
so mind-boggling as the others you’ve just read, it is no less significant. If
English isn’t your first language and you would rather have Croatian, Dutch,
Estonian, French or Finnish governing your dashboard, you’re in luck.
If you don’t happen to speak one of
the forty languages listed and you are more comfortable with something else,
hold on tight. The WordPress team is actively updating their list with new
language translations all the time.
5.
22% of New U.S. Registered Domains Run on WordPress
Out of every 100 domains registered
in the U.S., 22 of them will be run on WordPress. Considering that an average
of 120,000 domains are registered worldwide per day, it’s safe to say that
WordPress is growing by leaps and bounds.
That “18.9%-of-all-website” figure
is increasing all the time.
6.
WordPress.com Gets More Unique Visitors Than Amazon (Us)
WordPress.com records an astonishing
126M unique visitors per month, while Amazon falls quite a ways behind,
clocking in at 96M uniques per month.
7.
WordPress.com Employs Only 229 People
It’s hard to believe but true. The
site that receives 130% the unique visits of Amazon employs only 229 people. To
keep that in perspective, Amazon.com employs 88,400 people to run their
business, 38,603% more than WordPress.com.
That is probably one of the reasons
why they’re always looking
for new developers to join their team.
8.
6 New WordPress.com Posts Every Second
That’s right. Every second, close to
6 (the actual figure is 5.7) new posts are published on WordPress.com blogs.
That averages out to 342 posts per minute. Just above 20,000 per day. And a
grand total of 7.49 million annually.
Not only is WordPress.org the
world’s most popular self-hosted CMS solution, but the free version is also
second in popularity on the list of free blogging platforms, with Google’s own
Blogger topping it.
There’s a neat map view on the
WordPress.com site that shows you the location of a blogger as he publishes a
post in real-time.
9.
WordPress Developers Charge $50/hr
A 2012 survey revealed that the
average rate for a WordPress project clocks in at $50/hr. It’s nothing to write
home about, but $50/hour is a decent sum for most.
oDesk, one of the most popular
outsourcing sites in the world, lists WordPress development as the fifth
most-requested skill. Freelancer.com, a similar website, has thus far recorded
over $3.5M in revenue for WordPress developers.
WordPress development is clearly a
valuable skill to learn — one that can definitely pay off in the future. The
need for it won’t be going anywhere for a while.
10.
29,000 WordPress Plugins and Growing Daily
Without doubt, the number one
feature that sets WordPress apart from any other CMS is their plugins. Plugins
extend and capitalize on the functionality of WordPress — removing access to
them would cripple WordPress users (and that’s one of the reasons why
WordPress.com falls second to Blogger).
Fortunately, nothing of the sort is
happening. On the contrary, WordPress.org’s database of plugins has recently
hit 29K and a new one is added nearly every hour. In total, these plugins have
been downloaded 286,000,000+ times. Give it a few years and all you’ll be
hearing is “there’s a plugin for that”.
11.
98 Versions of WordPress to Date
There might only be 229 employees,
but those 229 sure are kept on their toes. Major updates are rolled out once
every few weeks.
In addition to that, the
WordPress.com source code is updated 60-80 times per day, pushed out many times
throughout the day. These changes are synced with the WordPress.org platform
daily.
12.
46 Million Downloads of WordPress.org
The free WordPress.org platform that
supports self-hosted websites has been downloaded 46 million times up till July
of 2013, which approximates to 100 downloads every day since 2003. You might
not have downloaded WordPress and uploaded it to your FTP manager yourself, but
when you installed it using Fantastico or the much loved 1-Click, it was
counted as a download.
Since it’s only in the recent years
that blogging has suddenly become quite a bit more popular, the downloads per
day in 2014 are significantly higher (think tens of thousands) than they were
in 2003.
13.
WordPress Is Most Popular With Business Websites
Of the top 1,000,000 sites in the
world, the number of business sites (most popular with WordPress) powered by
WordPress is five times the number of WordPress-managed news sites (least
popular with WordPress).
This statistic is not all that
surprising, as online marketing circles will often discuss WordPress more than
any other CMS out there. WordPress also ranks high as one of the most blogged
topics in the online marketing niche and nearly all its keywords have very high
PPC competition.
14.
Akismet Is the Most Popular Plugin
Of all the 19,000 free plugins
available for download, Akismet has received the most downloads. The main
reason for this is that Akismet comes auto-installed with the newer versions of
WordPress.
Akismet has been downloaded a total
of 18 million times, a truly mind-blowing figure. The spam protection plugin
alone has been responsible for close to .06% of all plugin downloads at
WordPress.org. The All in One SEO Pack from Michael Tolbert comes in at a very
close second, with a total of 17 million downloads. In third place,with 14
million downloads, is Contact Form 7 , another familiar name to most bloggers.
Wrapping
Up
The statistics that make WordPress
the world’s most popular CMS are truly mind-numbing.
In its
eleven short years of its existence, WordPress had dominated the CMS market. Our company mostly
use it , it isn’t going anywhere, either.
