WordPress Statistics & Facts You Must Know

WordPress statistics & facts

Table of Contents

WordPress has come a long way since its release in 2003. There has been incredible growth in its popularity and the growth doesn’t seem to be slowing down. In fact, WordPress powers over 39.5% of all the websites on the Internet. Yes – that’s the percentage of websites using WordPress. More than one in five websites are likely created via this CMS platform. WordPress popularity has soared in the last decade. Very few things such as WordPress have disrupted the digital marketing landscape.

So if you are looking to build an online presence for your business or wondering “what percentage of websites are WordPress?” we have compiled a list of WordPress stats that will be of huge help to you. As you know we at CyberChimps are a big fan of this CMS platform. Here are some interesting 2021 WordPress statistics that might surprise you!

Here are some interesting 2021 #WordPress #statistics that might surprise you!

WordPress General Statistics 

1. WordPress is now powering 39.5% of all the websites in 2021, a growth of nearly 5% from 35% in 2020, and a 4% rise from the year before.

2. Out of all the CMS built websites, WordPress has a 64% market share. That is a 4% growth from 2020.

3. 43.6% of all the websites use a custom-made CMS.  

4. As stated by Automattic, WordPress gets 163 million visitors per month. That’s 13 million more visits than Twitter which only gets 156 million unique visits. 

Did you know? WordPress gets 163 million visitors per month. That’s 7 million more visits than Twitter which gets 156 million unique visits. 

5. More than 400 million people view on an average of 21 billion pages each month on WordPress sites. 

6. WordPress users publish an average of 70.5 million new posts and 52.1 million new comments each month.

7. WordPress needs less than 5 minutes for installation. Yes, it’s THAT simple!

8. WordPress has less than 800 employees worldwide. 

9. The average salary of a WordPress web developer in 2021 is $52000

10. WordPress is not only for blogging, almost 28% of all e-commerce goes through WooCommerce.

11. WooCommerce was taken over by WordPress in 2015, amounts to 24% of the eCommerce sales volume

12. About 44% of WordPress websites are in English.

This data is provided by W3Techs that publishes the usage statistics of web technologies, including content management systems (CMS), operating systems, and more.

WordPress has a commanding lead over other CMS platforms. It was developed by Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little, on the desire of having a neat and well-architectured publishing system built on PHP and MySQL and licensed under the GPL, which means that it can be used and customized by anyone and all of this is for free.  “Mullenweg was just 19 years old, and a freshman at the University of Houston at the time.

The total collaborative effort behind developing WordPress is estimated to have taken 358-people years to build, with an estimated cost of over $21 million.

WordPress statistics & facts

The total collaborative effort behind developing #WordPress is estimated to have taken 358-people years to build, with an estimated cost of over $21 million.

WordPress Usage Statistics

Wondering how many websites use WordPress? Here are some of the WordPress usage statistics. Well, it now powers 39% of all the websites over the internet with a 65% share in the CMS market. Here are the usage statistics of the top 10 content management systems on the web:

[wptb id=418104]
WordPress Statistics Chart

Besides being the most popular CMS platform, it is also the fastest-growing. Local communities have organized many WordCamps in almost 76 countries across the globe. Till now almost 1064 WordCamps have been organized. Check out the WordCamp schedule to find out a meet up near you.

WordPress Version Statistics

This WordPress statistics shows how WordPress is evolving over time. WordPress recently released its latest version, 5.4, and about 27% of its users have updated their current version. It has also been downloaded over 14 million times.

WordPress Statistics

There many users who are still using the older version of WordPress. About 25% of users are still using versions of WordPress that are older than 5.0!

“ Can’t risk, might break my website”

“ The website working fine, so why bother”

“ I don’t think that’s necessary”

These are some of the responses from the website owners when asked why haven’t they updated their WordPress version. A report suggests that about 70% of WordPress installations are prone to hacker attacks. It is true that the website owners are hesitant to upgrade despite the major bug and security fixes. But, the consequences of not doing so are uncanny. Thanks to its popularity, WordPress is a preferred target for hackers all around the world. And with every WordPress version, the developers introduce fixes that take care of any security flaw of the previous version. 

The reason behind the failure of not updating to the newer version might also have something to do with Gutenberg. The block editor based editor brought a drastic change to the WordPress visual editor and the users had a hard time adjusting to the change.

The Gutenberg project is a fundamental shift for WordPress. And to ease the transition of switching from the classic editor to the Gutenberg editor the Classic Editor plugin will be officially supported until December 31, 2021.

Since the release of Gutenberg, there are: 

  1. Over 61 million active installations
  2. 159.5 million posts have been written to date
  3. Around 300 posts are written each day

WordPress Plugin Statistics

Since WordPress has been launched, 36 versions have been introduced. WordPress plugins began being added to the WordPress directory in 2004 after the introduction of version WordPress 1.2.

 Currently, the WordPress directory has 58000+ plugins, collectively these plugins have been downloaded 1 billion times over!  Enough downloads for every single person in India.

Currently, the #WordPress directory has 58000+ plugins, collectively these plugins have been downloaded 1 billion times over! Enough downloads for every single person in #India.

All of these plugins are free to use, which means minimum barriers to attract new users. Having it for free is a strong driver. 

All the plugins listed in the WordPress repository provide the minimum functionality. Means, they do something whether or not you deem it to be useful or not. In fact, any developer needs to add minimal working functionality to the plugin in order to get listed. 

The top 11 plugins that have been downloaded more the most include:

  1. Akismet- 5+ million active installations
  2. Jetpack – 5+ million active installations
  3. WooCommerce- 5+ million active installations
  4. WordPress Importer- 4+ million active installations
  5. WP Super Cache- 2+ million active installations
  6. Yoast SEO- 5+ million active installations
  7. Google XML Sitemaps- 2+ million active installations
  8. Monster Insights- 2+ million active installations
  9. Wordfence Security- 4+ million active installations
  10. Contact Form- 5+ million active installations
  11. All in One SEO Pack- 2+ million active installations

WordPress Theme Statistics

This section focuses on some interesting statistics of WordPress themes that define the appearance and display of your WordPress site.

Like plugins, there are both free and paid themes available. Most WordPress themes are built on what you see is what you get (WYSIWYG) editors, which helps the users to see the live changes. This functionality was introduced by Shane Melaugh and Paul McCarthy.

If you’re just getting started, you can download any WordPress themes for free from the WordPress Theme Directory, which releases free default themes each year, with a simple title representing the year of release (ie. ‘Twenty Twenty’). The earliest default WordPress themes were known as “WordPress Classic” and “Default” (or Kubrick).

WooCommerce Statistics

  1. Currently, there are 4,414,537 live websites using WooCommerce.
  2. WooCommerce is used by 7.4% of all websites and powers over 28.19% of all online stores.
  3. Out of the top 1 million sites, 22% of them operate on WooCommerce.
  4. There are over 1200 WooCommerce themes on ThemeForest and 980 plugins on WordPress.org.
  5. The number of downloads WooCommerce has is 82,477,514 (and counting!)
  6. WooCommerce is the second-fastest-growing CMS. 330 sites that run on WooCommerce come in the top 10 million every day. WordPress leads with 980 daily additions.  (Source: w3techs)
  7. 92% of all the WordPress e-commerce sites use the WooCommerce plugin.

Were there any specific WordPress stats that you hoped we’d cover in this article but didn’t? Tweet your thoughts at @cyberchimps and we’ll share our favorites!

Frequently Asked Questions

WordPress powers over 39.5% of all the websites on the Internet.

Total active websites are over 1.3 billion which means there are almost 450,000,000 websites that using WordPress right now!

The core team of WordPress has had over 70 contributors that contains about 430000 lines of code.

The WordPress repository has over 58,000 plugins till date.

WordPress was launched on May 27, 2003. It has been around for over 17 years!

A view is when a user loads the page. A visitors is counted when a user visits the website in a given period of time. 

Just open the source code of a website. To access the source code in Chrome, go to your browser settings and click on More tools > Developer tools.

In Firefox find the Web Developer in your browser menu. The source code’s file extensions and URLs will show which platform the website is built on.

 

The exact numbers of website keep increasing every minute. According to Netcraft’s September 2020 Web Server Survey, there are over 1 billion websites on the internet today.

Free eCommerce website templates

Download Free Responsive theme that comes with 40+ Ready-site templates that you can easily import and save your valuable time in building websites from scratch.

Top

Grab Flat 20% Off On All Plans - Limited Time Offer! 🥳 🎉