⚡ Quick facts:
- Current WordPress Market Share: 43.2%
- Estimated number of websites using WordPress: 85,6 million*
*Based on the number of active websites.
WordPress is the most popular free and open-source website builder CMS (content management system) that powers millions of websites all over the world.
With WordPress, anyone can build and manage their blogs and websites without having to learn how to code.
In this post, we have compiled the most important WordPress statistics and facts to help you better understand what WordPress is, how it works and where on the market it stands.
Now, let’s start with the basic WordPress statistics…
General WordPress Statistics
Percentage of websites using WordPress:
43.2% of all websites on the entire Internet currently use WordPress as their content management system. This number is 36% for top 1 million websites, 20% for top 100K websites, and 14% for top 10K websites respectively.
Here is how the percentage of the websites using WordPress looks in the pie chart:
The founders of WordPress are American and British developers, Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little respectively.
A glance at some other quick facts and statistics:
1. WordPress was initially released by the team of developers, Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little on May 27th, 2003 as a b2/cafelog fork work. Now, WordPress is built on PHP (general-purpose scripting language) and MySQL (Structured Query Language).
2. Being licensed under GPLv2 (GNU General Public License version 2), WordPress is available for use and modification by anyone.
3. The cost that was estimated to be behind this collaborative effort was over $8 million.
4. On average, every day, almost 1500 WordPress downloads take place with all-time downloads crossing over 10,700,368.
5. The most recent stable release 5.6.1 was on February 3, 2021, and the build is frequently updated by the developers.
6. As mentioned above, being the world’s most popular CMS, WordPress powers 43% of all websites on the internet.
7. A total of 64.3% of the market share in the CMS sector belongs to WordPress.
WordPress Usage Statistics
1. Along with WordPress being the most used CMS, it is also the fastest-growing.
2. In contrast to that, only around 60 to 80 websites a day are built on platforms like Shopify and Squarespace.
3. A huge percentage of 14.7% of all the world’s top million websites are powered by the WordPress CMS.
4. Approximately, 17 blog posts are published per second using the WordPress platform.
5. More than 37 million global searches for the word ‘WordPress’ take place every month.
WordPress Development Statistics
1. Today, WordPress is on version 5.6 and more than 36.6% of users have updated to this latest version already.
2. The latest WordPress version 5.6 has been downloaded over 33 million times.
3. Gutenberg was a new development feature that was introduced in WordPress 5.0 and it changed the visual editor of the platform forever.
4. Gutenberg is installed on over 62.7 million WordPress websites and over 168.2 million posts are written as of now using this block-based editor.
5. To reach out to more people, WordPress is available in 72 languages.
6. 71% of all the sites published using WordPress have English set as the primary language.
7. Major developments or upgrades of WordPress are released in a frequency of 152 days.
WordPress Themes Statistics
1. WordPress releases a new free theme each year, bearing just the year of release as the theme name, which makes it easy to spot.
2. Envato Market, a theme and plugin marketplace, has over 11,000 paid WordPress themes in their collection, where the average costing of each comes to around $59.
3. Coming to a few examples, Avada is a popular responsive and multipurpose theme with more than 660,000 sales.
4. The7 is another widely used theme with more than 220,000 downloads.
WordPress Plugins Statistics
1. In the WordPress Plugin Directory, over 59,420 plugins are available and the numbers keep on increasing daily.
2. In a survey conducted from April 15, 2016, to April 16, 2019, there have been 18,262 published and available plugins.
3. The Classic Editor plugin is the most celebrated one with over 5 million installations and a 5-star rating by 800+ users.
4. 57% of the plugins have never been rated and 3% of all the plugins have never been updated.
5. Elementor is the leading WordPress page builder with more than 5 million active installs. At the same time, it is the fastest growing CMS, besides WordPress itself and it is expected to go solo with its own CMS in the future.
6. WooCommerce, the open-source eCommerce solution for WordPress, is used by 7.6% of all the websites on the Internet.
7. WooCommerce is used by 18.9% of all the websites that are powered by WordPress.
8. The top 22% of eCommerce sites are using Woocommerce on the WordPress platform.
9. Some popular plugins include Yoast SEO, with 301 million downloads, Jetpack with 250 million downloads, and Akismet, with 188 million downloads.
WordPress Security Statistics
Being the most chosen in the market, WordPress is an attractive target for malware and phishing attacks. But overall, WordPress is a very secure platform, and most of the security vulnerabilities happen when users don’t follow the best security practices (like regular theme/plugin update, secure hosting, and 2FA setup).
1. Sucuri, which is a security plugin, reported in 2018 that 90% of its threat clean-up requests come from WordPress.
2. Most of the WordPress vulnerabilities are caused by cross-site scripting issues, WordPress plugins, WordPress core files, and WordPress themes.
3. Outdated WordPress sites cause 44% of global hacking.
4. In 2020, Wordfence reported over 90,000 attacks on WordPress sites every minute.
5. According to the Sucuri 2019 report, 47% of all infected websites had at least one backdoor, allowing hackers to get access to WordPress websites.
WordPress Community Statistics
The WordPress community is a large representation of people, from various corners of the world, coming together for their mutual love for the open-source platform. Many free events are often organized to let people know about the usage of WordPress. These non-profit events organized by global volunteers are called WordCamps.
1. As of now, there have been 1,076 WordCamps in 369 cities and 65 countries all over the world.
2. 740+ meetup groups are there on the net with over 455,390 members, for organizing official WordPress meetups.
Automattic Statistics
Automattic is the creator of WordPress.com — the for-profit hosted blogging service.
Matt Mullenweg (co-founder of WordPress.org), also founded Automattic in 2005 that uses the WordPress CMS to run the blog hosting service, WordPress.com. While Automattic is not officially related to the open-source WordPress.org, they have made significant contributions to the CMS over the years.
1. $1.16 billion was the value of the company in May 2014, and now it employs around 873 people working from various places in the world.
2. Automattic has over 65 published WordPress.org plugins, and 100+ published themes.
3. Automattic also runs many popular WordPress plugins, including Jetpack, Gravatar, VaultPress, and Akismet.
Conclusion
WordPress statistics are staggering. WordPress has come a long way from simple CMS to become an internet phenomenon – a platform uniting thousands of people around it.
Being a massively popular product today, WordPress keeps on growing and evolving, so we’ll try to keep an eye on what’s going on around it and also keep this WordPress statistics page fresh and up to date – so you can always come back to check the latest stats.
Further reading:
- BuiltWith
- https://w3techs.com/technologies/details/cm-wordpress
- https://wordpress.org/download/releases/
- https://wordpress.org/plugins/
- https://wordpress.org/themes/
- https://wordpress.org/about/license/
- https://www.whoishostingthis.com/compare/wordpress/stats/
- https://wordpress.org/about/stats/
- https://w3techs.com/technologies/details/cm-woocommerce
- https://gutenstats.blog/
- https://www.codeinwp.com/blog/mesmerizing-wordpress-stats/
- https://themeforest.net/
- https://www.ilovewp.com/blog/plugins/an-analysis-of-18087-wordpress-org-plugins/
- https://blog.sucuri.net/2019/03/hacked-website-trend-report-2018.html
- https://sucuri.net/reports/2019-hacked-website-report/
- https://wordpress.org/news/2011/08/state-of-the-word/
- https://central.wordcamp.org/
- https://www.meetup.com/pro/wordpress
- https://w3techs.com/technologies/details/cm-elementor
These WordPress statistics are totally amazing and almost unbelievable. To think that it only started in 2003 is even more interesting. I have experience using WordPress-org for over 10 years and I still enjoy it.
Great article, really enjoyed reading these facts & stats. I think WordPress is really doing great in its field.
Great article! Thanks for the awesome information!
But does WordPress use 43% of cms or websites in general?