It’s official: when you visit a website, there’s a 1 in 4 chance that website is powered by WordPress! A recent survey of the web conducted by W3Techs has found that, while the numbers vary slightly from month to month, WordPress usage continues to trend up and as of November 2015 has officially broken the 25% mark! Let that sink in for a moment: 25% of the entire world wide web is brought to you using WordPress. Wow.
Extraordinary Growth
Started in 2003, WordPress had been tapped for use in 13% of the world’s websites by January 2011.[1] That’s an 8 year span. Over the next 4 years, half that time, WordPress has almost doubled to 25% of the world’s websites! That’s some pretty fantastic growth, but that’s not even the whole picture!
You can slice the Web into two very general factions if you were so inclined: websites that use a content management system (CMS) and those that don’t. The majority of websites that run without a CMS are serving statically rendered HTML webpages. The rest of the web uses a CMS to dynamically render content. WordPress is a CMS.
Non-CMS websites are on the decline, having lost almost 20% of the web from ~76% in January 2011 to ~57% in November 2015.[2] CMS-run websites meanwhile have made up that ground, now accounting for ~43% of the web.[2] Of that CMS-run portion of the web, WordPress accounts for ~59%.[3] WordPress is also the only CMS with more than 5% total market share that has shown growth since 2011, and also has almost 10x more market share than the next largest competing CMS![3]
So many numbers! What does all that mean? It means the percent of the web that uses the services that WordPress provides is growing at a steady rate, and more people turn to WordPress to provide that service than anywhere else! It’s also very interesting to note that W3Techs’ survey is conducted only on a representative sample of the Alexa top 10 million websites; that means only websites that are active and generating a respectable amount of traffic are included.[4]
Quick Stats
Here’s a quick look at some of the stats from W3Techs:
January 2011 | November 2015 | |
Non-CMS Market Share | 76.4% | 57.4% |
CMS Market Share | 23.6% | 42.6% |
WordPress Total Usage | 13.1% | 25.0% |
WordPress % of CMS sites | 55.3% | 58.7% |
Joomla % of CMS sites | 10.9% | 6.6% |
Drupal % of CMS sites | 6.1% | 4.9% |
And we’ll leave you today with a really cool visualization from W3Techs of where WordPress stands in relation to other content management systems in terms of usage and traffic. WordPress is literally outstanding!
WordPress is now used by 25% of Alexa's top 10 million websites!Click To Tweet
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