Why WordPress?

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2018’s Most Surprising WordPress Statistics

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WordPress is a global phenomenon that has come a long way since the release of the first version in 2003. The community has grown considerably, and that growth doesn’t seem to be slowing down.

WordPress is now the most dominant CMS on the market — standing head and shoulders above the competition with a good chunk of the marketshare.

The sheer size and scope of the impact WordPress has had on the internet is hard to imagine. That’s why we have collected some shocking WordPress stats to help put it all into perspective.

WordPress Took Over 112 Years to Build

Obviously that isn’t true because WordPress started in 2003, and you know, computers haven’t existed that long. It’s hard to tell just how many human hours it took to create the WordPress core, but that didn’t stop the people at Open Hub from trying.

According to Open Hub’s Project Cost Calculator, WordPress took an estimated effort of over 112 person-years. This is based off of 423,759 lines of code, with an estimated cost of over $6 million to fund a project of this size.

WordPress is the Top Content Management System

Companies such as W3Tech and Builtwith provide useful reports on internet usage using big data. These numbers may not be pinpoint accurate, but they do provide a valuable glimpse into today’s web trends.

According to W3techs, WordPress has 58.55% of the CMS marketshare — more than all other systems (eg, Drupal, Joomla) combined.

Another chart provided by BuiltWith, attributes 51% of the market share to WordPress. While the numbers may vary depending on the data collected, one thing is certain — WordPress is the top CMS on the planet.

34% of the Internet is Powered by WordPress

Considering that the number of total active websites is estimated at over 172 million according to a survey published by netcraft, that means that around 75,000,000 websites are using WordPress right now — with around half of those sites (37,500,000) being hosted on the WordPress.com shared hosting installation. This means that around 20% of all self-hosted websites use WordPress, which is still huge.

WordPress 4.7 Has Been Downloaded Over 19,700,000 Times

This figure is only for the latest version of WordPress, “Vaughn.” You can checkout the download counter at WordPress.org to see how many times the latest version has been downloaded.

Keep in mind that these are the download numbers, not the number of active WordPress websites. If we total that number with the download count for the 30 previous versions of WordPress, the number comes out to over 196 million downloads.

WordPress is *Still* Growing

The WordPress platform has evolved into a well-oiled machine thanks to the robust community.

Local communities organize WordCamps for users of all skill levels. So far there are 635 WordCamps, in 68 cities across the globe — mostly in the USA, Canada, Ireland, Portugal, Spain, Austria, Italy, Mexico, and South Africa.

It’s worth mentioning that 65 of the WordCamps took place outside of the US in the year 2016 alone. Check the official WordCamp Schedule to find a meetup near you. Below are some fresh stats from the 2016 State of the Word slideshow :

  • 115 Wordcamps took place in 41 hosting countries.
  • 3,193 Meetup events took place in 58 hosting countries.
  • WordPress.tv videos published increased by 26.7%.
  • The WordPress Foundation made $4.3 million in revenue, up from $2.8 million the previous year.
  • In the past 5 years marketshare growth has gone up from 13.1% to 27.2%.

WordPress is Available in Over 50 Languages

Internationalization and localization, abbreviated as i18n and l10n, is the process of translating software into another language.

The fact that WordPress is accessible in so many languages is one of the biggest things that set it apart from other platforms.

The WordPress Polyglots team is responsible for localizing WordPress — this includes the WordPress core, plugins, and themes.

WordPress has translations for over 160 languages, but only 65 are completely finished.

The latest version of WordPress (4.7) is written in 52 languages, which includes the 12 most popular languages of the world: Chinese, English, Portugese, Spanish, Arabic, French, Spanish, Urdu, Russian, Bengali, German, and Japanese.

The Polyglots team is growing steadily, and the future looks bright for the translation of WordPress into all the world’s leading languages.

WordPress Content is Published in Over 120 Different Languages

WordPress makes it easy to translate a website into a different language. Currently, the English language version of WordPress is at the top of the list with 71% of WordPress blogs. Next is Spanish (4.7%), Indonesian (2.4%), and Portugese (2.3%).

WordPress Sites Make Up 14.7% of the Top 100 Websites in the World

Some of the most successful companies in the world prefer WordPress as their CMS, including: TED, NBC, CNN, TechCrunch, People magazine, the NFL, Best Buy, CBS Radio, and UPS. These are just a few of the Fortune 500 companiespowered by WordPress.

WordPress Never Sleeps

Like a river, WordPress is in a constant state of motion. This live map of activity across WordPress.com lets you see comments, posts, and likes in real time.

To get a better idea of how much information is being read, published, and managed — check out these WordPress stats. Here you can find stats on files uploaded, posts, pages read, and much more.

WordPress Gets 175 Million Page Views Per Month

Can WordPress handle it? The answer is yes, WordPress handles an enormous amount of traffic on a daily basis.

The record for the most unique page views in a day on a WordPress website in 2016 is 187 million! This was of course on election day. WordPress.com also boasts an Alexa global website ranking of 54.

WordPress users publish 41.7 million new posts each month

Communication is the currency of the internet, and WordPress users are a spendy bunch. Users leave 60.5 million comments per month.

In 2016, WordPress Published 117,939,148,357 Words

Once again…that number is: One hundred seventeen billion, nine hundred thirty-night million, one hundred forty-eight thousand, three hundred fifty-seven. It’s quite a mouthful, and certainly more words than one person can utter in a lifetime.

WordPress.com Blogs Have Over 400 Million Monthly Viewers

There is a lot of reading and writing going on via WordPress. Over 400 million viewers looked at 20+ billion pages per month this past year.

WordPress Has Had 4,969 Commits by 70 Contributors

As one of the largest open-source projects in the world, WordPress has a large number of contributors. The WordPress developer team has had over 70 developers contribute to the WordPress core, which contains over 430,000 lines of code.

WordPress is the Fastest Growing Web Publication Software

Data collected from 2004-present comparing keyword searches for popular CMSs by Google Trends clearly indicates that WordPress related keywords rank higher among search engine queries than competitors such as Drupal, Blogger, and Sharepoint. If you want to draw traffic, write about WordPress.

WordPress is a Lucrative Career Opportunity

WordPress is able to solve many of the problems businesses face online. It’s a safe bet that serious skills in WordPress can translate into a lucrative career opportunity.

There is a high demand for skilled freelancers, contractors, and direct hires. A WordPress developer can make anywhere from $30 to $200 per hour according Mark Jaquith, a WordPress core contributor.

There are a number of jobs for a WordPress professional including:

  • Writer/Editor
  • Web Developer
  • Web Designer
  • Graphic Designer
  • Marketing and Social Media
  • Technical Support Specialist
  • Content Management

To get an idea of what people charge for WordPress services, you can visit the Envato Market’s WordPress section, or check out the WordPress freelancers at Upwork.

There Are 3,000+ Free GPL-licensed Themes for WordPress

You can find these free themes in the WordPress theme directory. There are also many themes available for purchase from 3rd party vendors. One of the largest commercial theme repositories is Themeforest, which has 8,600+ themes for sale.

WordPress Can Be Installed in 5 Minutes or Less

WordPress makes things easy because it automates many tedious tasks involved in web publishing. The Famous 5 Minute Install allows just about anyone to launch a WordPress site with just a few clicks — to the dismay of underemployed developers everywhere.

There Are 48,500+ Free Plugins for WordPress

Plugins extend the functionality of the WordPress core. You can find validated plugins in the official WordPress Plugin Directory.

They have been downloaded over 1.5 billion times. That’s more than enough downloads for every single human being in China. These are just the plugins from WordPress.org. There are thousands of other 3rd party plugins available for free or purchase, too.

Over 39% of All Online Stores Run on WooCommerce

WooCommerce, the most popular ecommerce software for WordPress, currently runs over 1.5 million active online stores. According to Builtwith, WooCommerce has a 10% share of the ecommerce technology market.

Jetpack Was Installed on Over 2,000,000 New Websites Last Year

Jetpack is an essential WordPress plugin loaded with features. This free plugin can help you accomplish a variety of tasks involving things like traffic insight, social media integration, backups, and security. This past year alone Jetpack helped WordPress users:

  • Automatically post 374 million posts to social networking sites
  • Optimize, cache, and deliver 29 million images per day from WordPress.com’s CDN
  • Prevent 23 billion brute force attacks.

Akismet Blocked 80 Billion Spam Comments

Akismet protects your comment section from spam, bots, and all sorts of bad news on the internet. With over 1 million active installs, Akismet successfully prevented 23 billion brute force attacks, too.

WordPress.com Only Has 532 employees

WordPress only has 532 employees (including 12 people named Michael) spread out between 51 different countries. This fact may not seem so strange until you consider their competitors.

WordPress must be doing something right if they can handle 175 million unique visitors with only a fraction of the employees that other big internet companies have.

It may certainly have something to do with the fact that WordPress is such a large open-source project, and that their workforce is 100% remote.

WordPress Denied 40% of DMCA Takedowns

One of the most attractive aspects of using WordPress is the freedom it affords the user.

WordPress promotes freedom of speech as well as the freedom to use, modify, and distribute the software in any manner you please. WordPress.com works hard to carefully enforce legitimate copyright claims, while pushing back against claims that stifle creativity or freedom of speech.

From Jan 1, 2014 to June 30, 2016 there have been 21,052 DMCA takedown notices. Some or all of the content has been removed on 60% of those websites. WordPress has compiled a short list of improper takedown demands in their Transparency report.

WordPress Denied 65% of Information Requests

From July 1, 2013 to June 30, 2016, WordPress received 361 information requests from governments and law enforcement agencies. Of the 499 sites specified, WordPress released information on 35% of those. WordPress seems to be much more transparent about issues like this compared to other CMSs.

A Final Word on WordPress Stats

These shocking stats are a testament to the impact that this publishing platform has had on web standards, usability, and the internet at large. WordPress has spread like wildfire in the past decade, and the community is thriving. Now, do you know any other amazing stats we failed to mention?

Further Reading and Resources

We have more guides, tutorials, and infographics related to WordPress:

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