If you’ve spent a reasonable amount of time on the internet (which if you’re reading, then you are. Just admit it) then I’m 99.99% sure that you know or have heard of WordPress. In fact, I’d be more shocked if you haven’t come across a website that hasn’t been powered by WordPress.
Given how popular WordPress is as a CMS (content management system), it’s no surprise that they would have accumulated a whole bunch stats and data that are pretty amazing.
So, we decided to scour the internet and compile some WordPress site stats and any other interesting WordPress usage stats in this big list. Plus, if you’re a content creator, you can even use some of these data to create infographics, articles, or any other cool content.
Without further ado, let’s get into the WordPress statistics!
The internet is a vast space. There are millions upon millions of websites – be it a business blog or personal resume website, currently available for you to visit and about a quarter (or 38.5% to be exact) of those are made and powered by WordPress. That basically means that 1 in every 4 websites is bound to be a WordPress website, which goes to show how much of the internet is WordPress!
It’s astonishing that WordPress is powering 38.5% of the internet, but what’s even more astonishing is that it was due to an increase in usage by about 3.9%. Given how tough the CMS competition currently is, it’s amazing that WordPress is still able to and shows you how many people use WordPress to this day.
To continue highlighting WordPress’ dominance in the CMS industry, this WordPress statistics show that currently, WordPress is holding about 63.5% of the content management system share. That’s a huge gap over all of the other CMS platforms combined!
WordPress as a CMS platform is very powerful and is capable of creating and handling any kinds of website. It still amazes me how many websites use WordPress as their CMS of choice and some of those big sites include Quartz, Techcrunch(!), Facebook Newsroom, BBC America, Venturebeat, and more.
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Alexa, the analytics tool by Amazon, monitors the global traffic of websites all over. WordPress.com is the only CMS company that manages to rank in at 62 under their Alexa Global Website Ranking.
We know that WordPress has powered a lot of websites since their inception, but it’s amazing to see how many people have people use WordPress as a platform and downloaded them. Currently, the number stands at a staggering 157,563,262 downloads and it’s still counting!
A crazy number to think about is the amount of content/comments that gets produced on WordPress every month. This WordPress site stat shows that there are 70 million new posts and 77 million new comments every month. That literally amounts to more than 27 new posts and 198 new comments every second!
To give you an idea of how massively popular WordPress is compared to its competitors, they were the only CMS platform that managed to reach 100 (the peak popularity) at Google Trends. Other platforms such as Drupal, Blogger, and Sharepoint barely even managed to reach 50.
To continue on the search engine and WordPress stats, the keyword “WordPress” continues to be a popular term that people use for searching. KWFinder shows that every month, the keyword “WordPress” gets searched 2,739,999 times every month.
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Despite being a huge corporation that powers about a quarter of the internet, the number of employees that WordPress has topped up at about 1,278 people only. That’s significantly smaller than a lot of the other tech companies.
We know that comparing Amazon to WordPress is like comparing apples to oranges, but the fact is, both are tech companies. And, despite being 624 times smaller than Amazon, WordPress still manages to pull 58 million monthly unique visitors (US) compared to Amazon’s 215 million.
Plugins are a great tool to help website owners add-in features and functions without the need for coding. When it comes to plugins, WordPress is still the king as they offer 57,655 plugins in their library, which easily dwarfs all the other competitors.
Divi, Genesis Framework, and Avada are WordPress’ most popular themes and each has been used by over 13,894 websites, 8,705 websites, and 7,853 websites respectively. That’s a total of 3.05% of the top 1 million sites using the same themes!
Given how popular WordPress is and how many websites uses WordPress, it’s just a matter of time before a blog or a website gets spam comments. And wouldn’t you know it, Akismet showed that 400 billion spam comments have been caught on WordPress. That’s like a million spam comments every few minutes! The WordPress statistic itself received quite a number of feedback on Twitter as well.
With the huge library of plugins that WordPress offers, there’s bound to be a few that stands out among the rest. That plugin is Yoast SEO, which is a tool you can use to help with search engine optimization. Currently, Yoast SEO boasts a download number of 130,801,289.
We’ve talked about Akismet a bit before and how they managed to catch over 400 billion spam comments. Well, you can add being the second most popular plugin to that list as they currently have 118,069,141 downloads at WordPress.
WordPress offers some of the best plugins available on the market. Plugins such as Contact Form 7, Yoast SEO, Akismet, Jetpack, and more are of the top WordPress plugins that boast some of the biggest active installation bases of about +5 million based on the WordPress usage stats.
Avada, the WordPress theme from Themeforest, is one of the most popular paid themes on the platform. At $60, the theme managed to sell over 450,000 copies which generated over $27,000,000 in sales and counting.
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When you think of WordPress, odds are you’ll think of blogs. However, WordPress is such a flexible platform, you can even create an online store using plugins. WooCommerce is one such plugin, and they currently power 28% of the online stores in WordPress with 51,563,803 downloads.
Speaking of WooCommerce, did you know that WooCommerce is also one of the most popular eCommerce technology today? Out of 1 million eCommerce sites, WooCommerce stands at the top by powering over 20,000 of the top 1 million websites today.
WordPress is undoubtedly a popular platform for a lot of websites. Based on these numbers by BuiltWith, 310,599 of the top 1 million websites currently uses WordPress as their main CMS platform. If you break down the WordPress stats of the top 100,000 websites, WordPress still powers 33,283 of them. Go even further down to the 10,000 websites and at least 3,388 of them uses WordPress. This shows just how many websites use WordPress.
When you take a look at the entire internet, WordPress clearly owns a majority of the share as they currently being used by 26,938,805 websites. That basically accounts for over 50% of the internet!
Given how many websites use WordPress, there’s bound to be a few that violates the company’s Intellectual Property agreement. Since January 2014, at least 53,718 takedown notices have been issued by WordPress with some or all of the content ended up being removed on 39% of the websites.
Since WordPress is the most used CMS platform on the internet, it makes them more likely to get attacked and infected by hackers and viruses. Sucuri’s report shows that out of 34,271 infected websites, 83% of them uses WordPress.
Vulnerabilities in the WordPress core came to light in 2019 when it was discovered that malware was being injected by skimmers. The same malware also affected Magento users and allowed hackers to steal credit card information from the systems affected.
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WordPress offers a ton of security and they continually update their platform to ensures that users are protected from potential threats. However, 39.3% of the WordPress sites that got hacked were due to outdated installations of the platform. So, always remember to update your installations if you want to be safe
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WPScan did a report on the vulnerabilities that WordPress suffers as a CMS platform. Out of the 11,632 vulnerabilities, 2,944 of them are unique and the breakdown for the vulnerabilities types are 74.27% due to outdated versions, 22,69.% due to plugins, and 3.04% due to themes.
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Cross-site scripting (XSS) is a type of computer security vulnerability that’s typically found in web applications. Research by KeyCDN shows that 40.9% of their vulnerability comes from XSS such as SQLI, Upload, CSRF, RCE, FPD, etc.
Google has recently started taking website security into consideration for their ranking. Because of that, 36.28% of WordPress websites have started using HTTPS, which is a 14% increase compared to the previous year.
WordPress has created a number of new jobs for web developer and coders who are familiar with the system. These WordPress developers will usually make somewhere between $10 to $300 per hour based on the stats from UpWork.
Hiring a WordPress developer is relatively affordable for the most part. Based on UpWork, the freelance website, the general rate for hiring a WordPress developer to work on your website is roughly about $10 to $30 per hour.
If you’re thinking of working for WordPress, then you can expect to get a pretty decent salary. Simply Hired researched the average salaries for jobs at WordPress and narrowed it down to about $66,775.
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Freelancer.com is a website where you can hire freelancers to work on projects/one-off assignments. When you search for jobs related to WordPress, you’ll see that there have been about 344,750 jobs posted (both open and closed) on the website.
According to Open Hub’s Project Cost Calculator, WordPress took an estimated effort of over 151 person-years. This is based on 560,648 lines of code, with an estimated cost of over $8.2 million to fund a project of this size.
WordPress is known for being a platform that simple and easy to use. Apparently, using WordPress is so intuitive, that you can even install the whole platform in just 5 minutes! That definitely makes it one of the faster to install.
You can use any web host provider if you want to use WordPress, However, there are only 3 web hosts that WordPress recommends on its official website. Those 3 are Bluehost, Dreamhost, and SiteGround.
This site you are reading is powered by WordPress.org and hosted at SiteGround. BlueHost, on the other hand, is one of the cheapest WordPress hosting solutions in market.
The JetPack plugin by WordPress is a popular tool for accomplishing a variety of tasks such as traffic insight, social media integration, backups, and security. It’s one of WordPress most popular free plugin with over 93 million downloads so far.
WordPress recorded the number of pageviews that was accumulated on blogs that were hosted on their site and were using the Jetpack plugin. The highest pageview numbers they got? 24,567,344,460 back in May 2017.
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Since WordPress has an international audience, it needed to be translated to a number of different languages.
WordPress is a global platform, which means they need to cater to an international audience that read and speak different languages. As of today, WordPress is supported in over 120 languages with English being the most used at 71% followed by Spanish and Indonesian by 4.7% and 2.4% respectively.
WordCamp is a WordPress workshop/conference that focuses on topics and issues regarding WordPress. Currently, there are 898 WordCamps happening in over 71 cities around the world, with sessions such as advanced WordPress techniques, beginner plugins, and more taking place.
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Matt Mullenweg organized the first WordCamp back in 2006 in San Francisco. Back then, the event was much smaller and ran only for 1 day. Despite being a small event for users and developers, they had about 500 hundred people attending the conference.
While WordPress is mostly known for being a CMS platform, they are also responsible for 21 popular products/services that are available online. Some of them include Gravatar, PollDaddy, WooCommerce, Akismet, and more.
WordPress is quite transparent with their financials and in a 2017 report, it showed that the company made $4.3 million in revenue. The report shows WordPress revenues from two different streams, the WordPress Foundation and the WordPress Community Support, PBC.
WordPress has recently announced that they’ll be launching a new program called Tide, sometime in 2018. The program is used to conduct a series of automated tests that run against theme and plugins.
WordPress is an amazing CMS and over the years, they have achieved numerous milestones and successes that continue to wow us. We hope that all the statistics that we presented shows WordPress in a different light to you and they have helped millions upon millions of users to get their website journey started.