UPDATE: Check out our updated post giving you all of the latest WordPress statistics, a lot has changed since 2014!
There’s no disputing the fact that WordPress is by far the most prominent CMS out there. The brainchild of Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little, WordPress has risen to superstardom in the blogosphere in the 11 short years since it was released.
You might be thinking that you already know just how popular WordPress really is. Think again, because these 14 WordPress usage statistics may well give you pause for thought.
1. 48% of Technorati’s Top 100 Blogs Are Managed With WordPress
When you consider that there are is an enormous amount of alternative content manage systems available, this statistic speaks volumes about WordPress popularity.
If you decide to go with WordPress, you will definitely be with good company. The New York Times, CNN, Mashable, and eBay all run their blogs on the most popular CMS in the world – WordPress.
2. 74.6 Million Sites Depend on WordPress
Yep, you read that right. 74,652,825 sites out there are depending on good ol’ WordPress. That’s one site per person in Turkey.
Around 50% of this figure (close to 37 million) is hosted on the free WordPress.com. In the realm of self-hosted sites, WordPress accounts for 18.9% of all websites. That’s even more astounding when you consider that over 70% of sites worldwide do not use a CMS.
3. WordPress-Related Keywords Score 37 Million Searches Per Month
The keyword “WordPress” alone receives over 450,000 exact match searches every month. That’s just “WordPress”, not “WordPress help” or “WordPress plugins” or anything of the sort.
When you count the searches of all keywords with WordPress or WP (a common abbreviation for WordPress) in them, the monthly figure is a whopping 37 million searches. Assuming that this figure remains constant, WordPress will get 444 million searches in 2014. That’s nearly one and a half times the population of the U.S.
WordPress is searched five times as much as Joomla and nine times more often than Drupal.
4. 40 Translations of WordPress
While the actual number isn’t half so mind-boggling as the others you’ve just read, it is no less significant. If English isn’t your first language and you would rather have Croatian, Dutch, Estonian, French or Finnish (see full list of WordPress translations) governing your dashboard, you’re in luck.
If you don’t happen to speak one of the forty languages listed and you are more comfortable with something else, hold on tight. The WordPress team is actively updating their list with new language translations all the time.
5. 22% of New U.S. Registered Domains Run on WordPress
Out of every 100 domains registered in the U.S., 22 of them will be run on WordPress. Considering that an average of 120,000 domains are registered worldwide per day, it’s safe to say that WordPress is growing by leaps and bounds.
That “18.9%-of-all-website” figure is increasing all the time.
6. WordPress.com Gets More Unique Visitors Than Amazon (Us)
WordPress.com records an astonishing 126M unique visitors per month, while Amazon falls quite a ways behind, clocking in at 96M uniques per month.
7. WordPress.com Employs Only 229 People
It’s hard to believe but true. The site that receives 130% the unique visits of Amazon employs only 229 people. To keep that in perspective, Amazon.com employs 88,400 people to run their business, 38,603% more than WordPress.com.
That is probably one of the reasons why they’re always looking for new developers to join their team.
8. 6 New WordPress.com Posts Every Second
That’s right. Every second, close to 6 (the actual figure is 5.7) new posts are published on WordPress.com blogs. That averages out to 342 posts per minute. Just above 20,000 per day. And a grand total of 7.49 million annually.
Not only is WordPress.org the world’s most popular self-hosted CMS solution, but the free version is also second in popularity on the list of free blogging platforms, with Google’s own Blogger topping it.
There’s a neat map view on the WordPress.com site that shows you the location of a blogger as he publishes a post in real-time. Check it out.
9. WordPress Developers Charge $50/hr
A 2012 survey revealed that the average rate for a WordPress project clocks in at $50/hr. It’s nothing to write home about, but $50/hour is a decent sum for most.
oDesk, one of the most popular outsourcing sites in the world, lists WordPress development as the fifth most-requested skill. Freelancer.com, a similar website, has thus far recorded over $3.5M in revenue for WordPress developers.
WordPress development is clearly a valuable skill to learn — one that can definitely pay off in the future. The need for it won’t be going anywhere for a while.
10. 29,000 WordPress Plugins and Growing Daily
Without doubt, the number one feature that sets WordPress apart from any other CMS is their plugins. Plugins extend and capitalize on the functionality of WordPress — removing access to them would cripple WordPress users (and that’s one of the reasons why WordPress.com falls second to Blogger).
Fortunately, nothing of the sort is happening. On the contrary, WordPress.org’s database of plugins has recently hit 29K and a new one is added nearly every hour. In total, these plugins have been downloaded 286,000,000+ times. Give it a few years and all you’ll be hearing is “there’s a plugin for that”.
11. 98 Versions of WordPress to Date
There might only be 229 employees, but those 229 sure are kept on their toes. Major updates are rolled out once every few weeks.
In addition to that, the WordPress.com source code is updated 60-80 times per day, pushed out many times throughout the day. These changes are synced with the WordPress.org platform daily.
12. 46 Million Downloads of WordPress.org
The free WordPress.org platform that supports self-hosted websites has been downloaded 46 million times up till July of 2013, which approximates to 100 downloads every day since 2003. You might not have downloaded WordPress and uploaded it to your FTP manager yourself, but when you installed it using Fantastico or the much loved 1-Click, it was counted as a download.
Since it’s only in the recent years that blogging has suddenly become quite a bit more popular, the downloads per day in 2014 are significantly higher (think tens of thousands) than they were in 2003.
13. WordPress Is Most Popular With Business Websites
Of the top 1,000,000 sites in the world, the number of business sites (most popular with WordPress) powered by WordPress is five times the number of WordPress-managed news sites (least popular with WordPress).
This statistic is not all that surprising, as online marketing circles will often discuss WordPress more than any other CMS out there. WordPress also ranks high as one of the most blogged topics in the online marketing niche and nearly all its keywords have very high PPC competition.
14. Akismet Is the Most Popular Plugin
Of all the 19,000 free plugins available for download, Akismet has received the most downloads. The main reason for this is that Akismet comes auto-installed with the newer versions of WordPress.
Akismet has been downloaded a total of 18 million times, a truly mind-blowing figure. The spam protection plugin alone has been responsible for close to .06% of all plugin downloads at WordPress.org. The All in One SEO Pack from Michael Tolbert comes in at a very close second, with a total of 17 million downloads. In third place,with 14 million downloads, is Contact Form 7 , another familiar name to most bloggers.
Wrapping Up
The statistics that make WordPress the world’s most popular CMS are truly mind-numbing.
In its eleven short years of its existence, WordPress had dominated the CMS market. From what we can tell, it isn’t going anywhere, either.
Information sources: WordPress.com | The Next Web | Yoast Infographic | W3Tech | Automattic | BuiltWith Trends
Image credits: Berenika and kenteegardin.
Albert David
74.6 Million Sites ?!!! I imagined it would be a big number but not this big. And do they really employ only 229 people ?!!! How are they even managing? My God! These really are mind-boggling facts, Tom.
Sachiko Antonich
Very valuable information here. Thank you for this.
Jeff
Cool stats. It was a teeny bit tricky to find because Googling WordPress statistics brings up some of those 30,000 plugins but I am glad I tried again. These were some of the minds of numbers I needed to convince a few old school people it’s not a scary platform. I picked the wrong pony a few years back and developed on Drupal 4.6 and then found upgrading was a pig. Since switching to WordPress, I’ve managed to make some money redoing all but a few stubborn ones including one site still running FrontPage (grin) Next I’ll be curious to learn how many WordPress sites use DIVI vs other dev tools… grin.
V8web
Thanks for sharing this! great article.
alihamdan
Thanks for the great article! I appreciate that you aggregated all this information in one place. I only have one question. Where did you get the 74,652,825 number? I’ve looked at your sources listed at the bottom and I can’t seem to find this number.
movies online
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Very helpful information specifically the ultimate phase 🙂 I care for
such info much. I used to be looking for this particular information for a long time.
Thank you and best of luck.
Dallas
Thanks for sharing useful information about wordpress..
Ninja Team
What about WordPress popularity among countries?
Niagara Web Design
Awesome post!
My boss for some reason hates using WordPress, bookmarked for later to show him 🙂
Danny
WordPress powers almost 30% of the websites worldwide already 🙂
Brian
Hey Tom,
This number is ever growing! The get a clearer picture it’s important to see where the internet started and a look at the growth rate over the years.
The see size of the web year by year : https://www.wpmultiverse.com/blog/how-many-websites-are-there/
darlukman
Thanks
Gonçalo Costa
WordPress is a beast! We use it for all our clients sites. Unbelievable stats right here.
WordPress Translation
Thanks for this great article! One of WordPress popular plugins is WPML which enables localizing WordPress sites into several languages. Thought this might help!
kicker staff
Hey guys! I’m a WordPress blogger and I’d love to invite you to visit our WP Kicker blog! I’m sure you’ll find many interesting and useful articles for you!
Come and visit us here: http://wpkicker.com/
Keith
I use wordpress for all of my sites. It is good to read your article, it has opened up my eyes on a few statistics that I did not know. Thank you.
Savio
Hey Tom can you please cite the stats url sources all in one place? Some of us might want to see the latest data as well 🙂 Thanks for the awesome article Mate!
Chris
We are in the interim of changing our web developer and IT, but desperately need to make some minor changes to our website (Links, text edit, photo change) but have no idea on how to do this on WP. We are using Flywheel to host, and they have a great collaborator system, but I’m clueless on gaining access. I have Adobe dreamweaver, but I can’t seem to follow the instructions to access my site and make the changes. Any quick advice an how to see the page and make the changes?
Nemanja Aleksic
You can’t use Dreamweaver for WordPress. For quick advice on using WordPress, I recommend http://www.wp101.com and Lynda.com Essential WordPress Training course.
Peter
Hi Chris,
If you are still looking for a reliable developer to take care of your WordPress website, get in touch with us now. We are a passionate team of WordPress Experts with a combined work experience of 24 years.
Regards
Peter
sylvain tayo
i do not know how to create a website and i will like to have one. i need help
Fred Schneider
My son set up my web page a few years back and it worked great up until he went with Apple Computer and that system. He is way to busy to help the old man set up a new web page and not sure you can do that from the old one as I really liked it. We just can use it now to update. Anyone have any suggestions. I am a Vietnam Veteran and on very limited income right now. Thank you.
Chris
Hi Fred,
If you are still needing help, I would be happy to hear about your situation. Perhaps I can point you in a direction that works for you. Please drop me a line at my website LochValeDesign dot com
Thanks,
Chris
Chris
I jumped over to your website and discovered you are a Coloradoan. I’m located in Grand Lake, CO.
Chris
Ray Feeney
What is the best WP plugins to use?
Jill
I had someone start a word press site for me and I wasn’t happy with the progress, or the work. I am wanting to rehaul the content and basic look
of what is there. I am great at my business, growing, not so great at technology. My ultimate goal is to put an online store using word press. Is wp a good platform to accomplish that goal?
Nemanja Aleksic
Yes it is, it just looks like you hired the wrong person for the job. I suggest checking out Elance or Codeable to hire a WordPress developer that will get the job done.
Stacy
Yes! I am a freelance WP implementer, and I have set up quite a number of online stores. Elance has been taken over by UpWork. I have a profile on UpWork and It is possible to find a good provider there, but be careful – sometimes you really do get what you pay for. Any provider you choose should take the time to discuss your requirements with you first, not just jump in and say, oh yeah, I can do that for $500. You can also search for WordPress providers/implementers/services and take a look at provider portfolios.
You sound like the perfect client for many of us – “I am great at my business” but want someone else to help with the technology piece. The lifeblood of any business site IS the business – a website is just a tool for you. I try so hard to get that across to many of my customers – I can’t make your website DO your business if you don’t have something people want!
Remi
Thanks for your list. I will try to do this thanks a lot and good luck for the futur.
peter
how do I register with WordPress ? plz help
Nemanja Aleksic
Simply go to WordPress.com and register. It’s as easy as that 🙂
Dale Corrigan
Do we end up paying a lot in the long run. It’s free. But then what? After u make your website, does it start charging u . To get your stuff or ideas back. I would not mind paying if it helps .
Jon Wright
Check pricing structures at:
https://wordpress.com/website
If you are looking at hosting at WordPress – otherwise many other internet providers will have their own schemes.
Karl Pomeroy
Hello folks. I’m looking for information about the peculiar behavior of my wordpress statistics. This has happened over and over again. My stats are admittedly low. But that’s not what I’m asking. What I see is a weird pattern: my stats go along at a more or less constant rate. Then, if I suddenly publish a lot, my stats plummet, and then gradually climb over the next few days back to where they were. This makes no sense. The more rapidly I update on a given day, the more the stats suddenly drop the next day. But they always stairstep back up to normal over the next 3 days or so. Has anyone else seen this behavior?
I wondered if it could be the automatic wordpress spam software? I’ve been shut down twice by WordPress automatic span detection when I was updating about once ore twice a minute, putting out fast news items. My site resumed upon appeal. I wonder though if this could cause my problem?
susanbrabant
I am having a hard time grasping this.
jeevan
i have to solve it
penelope
nice blog….
suaramusik
I like using mobile platform
ThemesLegit
Many Thanks for this interesting WordPress facts.
Jonathan Lackman
Looks like the link to the stats page #8 has changed and is now https://wordpress.com/activity/
Nemanja Aleksic
Thanks for the heads up, Jonathan. I’ve updated the link in the article.
Ken
No you haven’t. The link is still wrong when I tried it.
Nemanja Aleksic
Now it’s definitely working 🙂
WordPress Showcase
Tom,
Thanks for the great list of WordPress sources. nice post and really useful. Great work.
Peter Mead
Hi Tom, firstly sorry for the website url in my previous comment, feel free to remove it if you wish, I know some folks see urls in comments as bad, sorry about that. I was just trying to acknowledge that I have quoted you in my post. Anyways.
But on the topic of how the site that receives 130% the unique visits of Amazon employs only 229 people. I really take my hat off to Matt for being organized and motivated. I met Matt once when he came to Melbourne, he was talking about Automatic and the WordPress origins. I have nothing but respect.
Anyways, thanks again Tom, all the best with your ventures.
Cheers,
Peter Mead
Peter Mead
Hi Tom, love your work. As usual you are delivering some awesome info here. Just to let you know I quoted you over at my blog hhttp://petermeadit.com/blog/2015/10/wordpress-security-with-wordfence/ I have blogged about the importance of security and I used your stats about “74,652,825 sites out there” I also linked back to your article here so folks would know you are the source here.
Another stat I am really impressed with is WordPress.com Gets More Unique Visitors Than Amazon (Us) … wow that is really saying something.
Gotta Love WP 🙂
Cheers,
Peter Mead
Bully
Its more than just thanking you.
Really a very helpful article.
francisca maitha
KINDLY GUIDE ME ON HOW I CAN GET STARTED
Jonah
Thanks Tom,
Just about to start a new blog about extreme sports such as skydiving, skiing and scuba diving and had already chosen to use WordPress as my CMS.
I chose it because it is very beginner friendly and plenty of support with a massive user base that is priceless and hard to match. I just need to decide which theme I want to use.
bob mondurafa
I was thinking of creating a webpage for my church organization thus i believe wordpress would be optimum for me as a beginner
Shahadu Sadik
Wonderful piece. But am new here with little knowledge in website design
ESTHER
i am very new in this platform and i want to create my own site please help
hanaph
i found it very interesting i want to learn it
Manju Hariharan
Mind blowing information!
Yogesh Shinde
WordPress is best, specially because anyone can work on WordPress. You don’t need to be coder to start your own blog or website. Different plugins make it easier and automate most of the tasks.
DIYBlogGuy
Impressive stats, but no doubt they are already outdated. It would be interesting to compare the stats now. I was once a Joomla fan boy but I’m glad I made the switch 🙂
IMHO Blogger will eventually go the way of those other underperforming apps google did own. It’s only a matter of time
Ekbal Jahir
No doubt,it works super.My own website’s platform is aslso of WP.
Thanks
The desi vagabond
Thanks for the stat. I was wondering if I should shift to another site. Amazing facts and I’m glad I own my domain. No regrets now. Tqvm ?
Gail Waltiere
I am very new to this and I do not have a computer. Will I still be able to build a website on my phone for a business I am trying to launch?
Hamza Akram
Yes you can use your smartphone to install and manage a wp site.
Irfan
Even i want to make website for My Business, so can u plz help me or guide me to create my Website..?
Sharon Leyland
I’m already a user and I find your software very useful. Although I’m still learning I do use something new almost each day. Thank You for this great tool.
Zadli
Thanks a lot, nice post and really useful. Great work.
Kevin Smith
Most of our clients are either using WordPress, or asking about how to get onto it after seeing it work so well. We operate our own domain on WP, and love it. Just be sure to have a host and admin that knows how to update and backup everything. Can’t wait to see what the future holds for WordPress.
Urban Mullen
Hello, Sunday March 19, 2015
Great info. I’ve known about WordPress for a long time but always thought of it as a big bag of hype and marketing trash!
I have been developing software and digital systems since the days when computers meant punched tapes, switches, relays, gears and cams and electronics meant relays and vacuum tubes. That was decades before of the 4004 an other early microcomputers.
Now I must be setting some kind of record as being the oldest new comer to WorldPress!
Thanks for you advise, Urban
Kevin Sinfield
It is great that WordPress is so popular, I have lots of website clients that are now requesting that there new website is built on WordPress.
Nkusi revocatte
i need more know about wordpress
Linda
What I’d like to know is how many of these WordPress users are actually using their sites to blog on a regular basis? Many start, but few have the staying power. Because WordPress is more business oriented, do you find more dedicated bloggers than on other blogging platforms?
johnedna8642
how do people start there on site what are the setting or how can u come up with sitting .who can hope me in the statement
Rick Blaine
My suggestion to you, a serious one, is to improve language and writing skills BEFORE anything else, no matter what language you use. Spelling, punctuation, grammar… all are lacking in your post. With hundreds of thousands of sites competing for viewers, a well-written site will easily outperform one that is sloppily written. Please take this advice as it is meant to be – helpful, not negative.
Jonah
Hey Rick, give the man a break. Perhaps JohnEdna8642 is planning to create a website/blog using his/her own native tongue and has no use for written English.
Barry Reynolds
WordPress is growing at a phenomenal rate as we’ve seen in the increase in business and awareness of WordPress over the last 5 years
Thomas
Hi there,
Could you indicate me where can I look for any stats of present number of installed WordPress sites, the number of manufacturers of plugins and themes for WordPress?
I will be grateful for any prompt Thomas
Ashish Ajani
Thanks a lot Tom, nice post and really useful. Great work.
Brooke
Anyone have stats on the number of responsive WordPress sites out there?
david
In fact, this post is awesome. Thanks a lot for the effort invested in this research.
Henrik
According to #2 I’m a litte confused about 74,6+ million WordPress websites “out there”. According to Builtwith.com january 2015 there’s “only” 12+ million websites depending on WordPress? Could you please comment on the 74,6+ compared to 12+ and maybe help understanding the difference? Thanks – and thanks for a great article! ;o))
Richa Varma
@Henrik, the 12 million+ count published by Builtwith.com (BTW, I just checked and found the count at 15 million+ right now) is based on the sites available in their records. I’m fairly sure their records do not include the entire web as it exists today. Even if they cover, let’s say at random, about a 10th of the web, that would be a massive fete in itself. For the rest, I’m sure you can do the math. 🙂
hosein
thank s
Xihla
This is truly massive. I have used wordpress from 2009 and I have never wanted to use anything else. And Akismet is the only plugin i have used to control spam comments. I doubt I will ever use anything else, I am a fan for life.
Thanks for sharing this! great article.
Joshua Muccio
Thanks for the great article! I appreciate that you aggregated all this information in one place. I only have one question. Where did you get the 74,652,825 number? I’ve looked at your sources listed at the bottom and I can’t seem to find this number.
Anthony
14. Akismet Is the Most Popular Plugin
A plugin i have never downloaded or used before… and ive downloaded a lot !
Someone
It’s installed by default 🙂
Nader
Also interesting to note is that out of the top 1 million websites, 51.31% host on wordpress. Out of the top 10k websites, 42.60% host on wordpress. Pretty massive.
Nader
I found the stats here: http://trends.builtwith.com/cms
Jean-Luc Winkler
Thanks you for those insights! Very nice Infographics and astonishing to know that so many sites run on WordPress. Even though I still wonder how they measured the “entire internet” 😉