Just How Dominant Is WordPress Anyway?

Does it seem like WordPress is everywhere you look on the web? It practically is. More than one-quarter of all websites now use it. In just 16 years, this Content Management System, or CMS, has conquered the blogosphere. Make that the webosphere!

Our Fort Collins web design team is heavily invested in WordPress with custom plugin development, and numerous client sites running on the platform. When our design team dug a little into WordPress stats in 2016, they discovered some fascinating facts about this ubiquitous platform.

Posts and Comments, Oh My

In 2017, more than 900 million posts were published on WordPress. Those generated more than a billion comments. According to calculations done by the folks at ManageWP, that’s over 2 million posts each and every day of the year.

Every month more than 600 million website users look at over 25 billion WordPress pages.

Esperanto Anyone?

WordPress is available in 57 languages. That includes Esperanto, Icelandic and Greenlandic. Even more translations are coming.

A little over 37% of all English language websites use WordPress. Almost 40% of Swedes and Turks use it. More than half of all Bengalese and Bosnians favor WordPress.

Hotshots Choose WordPress

More than 30% of the Top 1000 websites are made with WordPress. One would think this elite list would be fully custom content, and WordPress can do so much, the core of any website experience can be managed with it.

So Do the Hoi Polloi

Among those that are just happy to rank anywhere, definitely not in the Top 1000, WordPress is also the CMS of choice. Here is a breakdown:

• WordPress 58.7%
• Joomla 6.6%
• Drupal 5.0%
• Magento 2.9%
• Blogger 2.8%
• Everything else 24.1%

Every 74 seconds, one of the Top 10,000,000 (that’s right, there is such a list — the one for the rest of us) begins using WordPress.

If At First You Don’t Succeed…

Over the last 16 years there have been 143 versions of WordPress. These releases include maintenance and security as well as major updates.

A recent version of WordPress as of publishing time is 4.5. Within three weeks, users downloaded it over 6.5 million times.

For some reason, so far unstudied, Tuesday is the day of choice to download WordPress. National Download WordPress Day? It gets the fewest downloads on Saturday. That must be when people are downloading plugins (see below).

Thousands of Free Plugins

There are more than 42,000 free plugins available for WordPress. Add that to the paid plugins at CodeCanyon, WPMUDev and a boatload of other developer sites, and you start to see what people mean when they say WordPress is highly extensible.

Famous Sites Using WordPress

Many of the most-viewed sites on the web use WordPress including:

• Time
• The New York Times
• People Magazine
• Forbes
• National Geographic
• The New Yorker
• NFL
• Rolling Stones
• Beyoncé

Rank Higher with WordPress

The savvy people over at WordPress have built the CMS to handle 80% to 90% of Google’s crawling issues. The result is that WordPress sites have the potential to rank higher in the SERPs (search engine results page) than other types of CMS.

This alone could account for those 6.5 million downloads. Everyone wants to get in good with Google.

WordPress started as a blogging platform. Now it the web’s platform of choice, with numbers that keep going up. Are you one of them?

A Word of Caution About WordPress

Not to rain on the WordPress parade just as it’s picking up steam, but it’s always worth considering one unpleasant fact about any winning platform in tech: criminals gravitate where other people tend to gravitate. The WordPress install-base creates an irresistible, target-rich environment for ne-er do wells.

It’s one thing to say, “heck yeah, I want to make my new website in WordPress because it’s the dominant choice” – it’s quite another to say, “I have the faculties and capacity to keep my WordPress site secure and up to date with all necessary patches and updates from WordPress and my plugins.”

Many folks trying to build their own first website are especially vulnerable to hackers and malware distributors. Make sure you have a developer you trust to guide you through the challenges of hosting your WordPress site.

Shameless plug: we are a bad-ass WordPress web host ourselves…