WordPress is the biggest internet company that people who don’t work online haven’t heard of.
Typical internet users are well-acquainted with the search engine giants, the social media moguls, and the ecommerce tycoons. But typical users may not be aware that one company offers a free product that powers more than 6 out of every 10 websites across the entire internet.
WordPress is a free and opensource content management system (or CMS) with which millions of people publish billions of pieces of content to the web each month – including this post!
Here are 46 WordPress statistics and facts that demonstrate the breadth of the WordPress ecosystem:
WordPress as a Company
WordPress is a privately owned company held by Automattic. Automattic also owns several other companies that will be familiar to WordPress users, like Jetpack, Akismet, WooCommerce, and Gravatar. They are also behind Tumblr and Longreads [K].
WordPress was released in 2003 by founders Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little. In the summer of 2020, WordPress employed 1,234 people in 77 different countries [K].
WordPress Usage Statistics
As of July 2020, WordPress is the content management system for 63.5% of all websites across the entire internet [A].
This market dominance means that WordPress powers a tremendous amount of web traffic: [G]
- Over 20 billion WordPress pages are viewed by more than 409 million people each month.
- Every month, WordPress users create about 70 million new posts and 77 million comments.
WordPress is leagues ahead of other CMS competitors, powering 15 times more websites than Shopify, the second largest CMS on the market [A].
Small businesses and huge corporations alike use WordPress. Some of the biggest names using WordPress include: [A]
- Zoom.us
- Udemy.com
- Etsy.com
- Shutterstock.com
- Zillow.com
- Intuit.com
- Hootsuite.com
- Spotify.com
- TechCrunch.com
- TED.com
- CNN.com
- Archive.org
Stats about WordPress Around the World
WordPress is used all over the world to host websites in over 120 languages.
The top 5 languages for content published via WordPress are: [G]
- English (71%)
- Spanish (4.7%)
- Indonesian (2.4%)
- Brazilian Portuguese (2.3%)
- French (1.5%)
The WordPress CMS has been at least 90% translated into 76 languages, with an additional 128 languages in progress [B].
WordPress is also the number one CMS platform in 8 of the world’s 10 largest economies: [H]
- 43% of the market in the USA (number 1 largest economy)
- 42% of the market in China (number 2 largest economy)
- 50% of the market in Japan (number 3 largest economy)
- 27% of the market in the UK (number 5 largest economy)
- 69% of the market in India (number 6 largest economy)
- 16% of the market in France (number 7 largest economy)
- 39% of the market in Brazil (number 9 largest economy)
- 39% of the market in Canada (number 10 largest economy)
However, WordPress is not the dominant CMS in Germany or Italy, the two remaining top 10 economies [H].
- In Germany (number 4 largest economy), WordPress is the number 5 most used CMS with just 6% of the market, ranking behind Joomla!, Typo3, Jimdo, and 1and1.
- In Italy (number 8 largest economy), WordPress is the number 3 most used CMS with just 9% of the market, ranking behind competitors Joomla! and Duda.
Stats about WordPress Plugins
Plugins are software applications that integrate into the WordPress software to offer new features, ranging from help with SEO, to gallery widgets, to coupon code functionality, to analytics tools, and so much more.
The huge range of plugins made for WordPress are one of its key advantages. No other CMS on the market is compatible with so many Plugins.
As of July 2020, there are 57,282 WordPress plugins available via WordPress.org [C] and over 75.2 million websites are actively using various plugins for WordPress [E].
As of July 2020, the top 5 most popular WordPress plugins on the web are: [E]
- Yoast SEO (7.4 million active installations)
- Slider Revolution (4.1 million active installations)
- Visual Composer (4 million active installations)
- WPBakery (2.8 million active installations)
- Elementor (2.4 million active installations)
Stats about WordPress Themes & Site Builders
Another key advantage of WordPress that helps explain its market dominance are the many themes and site building applications available for it. Website owners across the web can choose from tens of thousands of free and paid themes and site builders developed for WordPress.
As of July 2020, WordPress.org lists over 7,600 themes [I], while ThemeForest.com has an inventory of 48,000 themes and builders for WordPress [J].
As of July 2020, the top 5 most popular themes or theme builders for WordPress are: [D]
- WooCommerce (3.87 million active installations)
- Divi (1.47 million active installations)
- Twenty Seventeen (756k active installations)
- Astra Theme (656k active installations)
- Avada (634k active installations)
WordPress Hosting Statistics
WordPress is such a giant in website management that there is even a non-trivial market sector for hosting services that center on providing an optimal WordPress experience.
WordPress optimized hosting services are used by roughly 749k sites across the entire internet [F]. This may not seem like a lot given the tremendous size of the web. But the significance of this market becomes apparent when you analyze which websites are using WordPress hosting.
More than 1 in 10 of the top 10,000 most visited sites on the web use a hosting service optimized for WordPress [F].
- WP Engine is the leader in high-end WordPress hosting, with 917 clients in top 10,000 most visited sites on the web.
- Kinsta and InMotion trail far behind, with just 77 and 31 clients in the top 10,000 respectively.
Across the entire Internet, WP Engine is the leading provider of WordPress optimized hosting, with over 367k websites using their services [F].
While InMotion Hosting may not have as many big-name clients as WP Engine, they do perform well among smaller websites. InMotion is used by 44% of all websites with WordPress optimized hosting, compared with WP Engine’s 49%.
Sources
[A] https://w3techs.com/technologies/details/cm-wordpress
[B] https://make.wordpress.org/polyglots/teams/
[C] https://wordpress.org/plugins/
[D] https://trends.builtwith.com/cms/wordpress-theme/traffic/Entire-Internet
[E] https://trends.builtwith.com/widgets/wordpress-plugins/traffic/Entire-Internet
[F] https://trends.builtwith.com/cms/wordpress-hosting
[G] https://wordpress.com/activity/
[H] https://trends.builtwith.com/cms/traffic/Entire-Internet
[I] https://wordpress.org/themes/
[K] https://automattic.com/about/
Last Updated on June 23, 2021 by Adrian Grant