WordPress has come a long way since its birth in 2003. The 16-year-old content management system has now become a name that almost everyone in the digital sphere is familiar with. In fact, WordPress statistics showing its progress and well-being are truly fascinating. They paint a thorough picture of how deeply loved this CMS is.
As a WordPress user or user-to-be, it’s best to know important WordPress statistics. That’s why we dug into them, and curated a list of the super amazing ones for you.
WordPress at a glance
The publishing giant powers 14.7% of the top 100 websites worldwide and boasts 75 million users. These include big names such as TEDBlog, USA Today, Fortune.com, TechCrunch, BBC America, CNN, New York Post, Thought Catalog, and Spotify to name a few.
Moreover, Technorati reveals that WordPress manages:
- 8% of the top 100 blogs
- 2,645 sites among the top 10,000 websites
- 22,111 sites of the leading 100,000 websites and
- 297,629 among the top 1 million sites on the web
In the CMS market, it has a whopping share of 61.4%, which is greater than most of the other prominent names such as Joomla and Drupal. The graph below shows market shares of leading content management systems with the complete list available here.
Such a mind-blowing market share has ranked WordPress as the most popular CMS for the 7th year in a row. WordPress growth has kept the same breakneck speed as its popularity with 500+ new sites built daily on it.
In fact, WordPress is visited more than Twitter on a monthly note as per statistics shared by Automattic, the parent company behind WordPress. What’s surprising is that only 955 employees (or Automatticians as they call themselves) run the show across 60+ countries.
On a comparative note, however, Twitter employs 3,920 workers, which is approximately four times more than the staff members at WordPress.
As for WordPress downloads, they keep peaking, having reached over 60,000 by now.Interestingly, data scientists have also looked at the popular days when WordPress downloads max out and have learned that Mondays are pretty popular when it comes to downloading the CMS. On the flip side, Fridays and Saturdays are the least popular days for WordPress to get downloaded.
WordPress versions statistics – all that you need to know
So far, WordPress has had 317 versions released. On average, these versions are released every 152 days with the majority, specifically, 34% releases made in December.
The latest in this line of versions is the WordPress 5.2 Jaco version that launched on May 7, 2019. In fact, WordPress 5.3 is also in the pipeline but it is planned for release in November, 2019.
Serious matters apart, an amusing fact is that each of these versions, released from 2004, is named after a jazz musician. The first one named this way was the WordPress 1.0.1 Miles update that came out in 2004. It was named after the musician, Miles Davis.
Along the same breath, the latest version 5.2 takes its name from the American jazz bassist, Jaco Pastorius. You can check out the jazz inspirations of other WordPress versions in the chart below:
That said, it’s important to share here that numerous sites run on outdated themes. This leaves them vulnerable to malicious attacks by hackers. Good news is 40% of users have updated to the latest Jaco version. In fact, it has been downloaded over 61 million times.
Still, over 20% of the users rely on WordPress 4.9.
The possible reason why the remaining users have not moved to the latest WordPress version 5.2 may be the Gutenberg block editor update that was released in December 2018.
Since its launch, the block-based editor has scored 26.6 million active installations. The only catch is that the WordPress classic editor had remained the default editor for several years while Gutenberg has only recently introduced change.
Of course, it will take folks a little time to embrace change, which explains why the Classic Editor has 5+ million installations.
Wrapping it up
This leaves you with a plethora of interesting WordPress statistics. Which of these did you find the most interesting? Share your thoughts in the comments.