What’s with all the WordPress facts and figures? The wonderful world of WordPress is filled with interesting statistics and informative bits of trivia. We have compiled some of the most important and impressive facts about the software to help you know more about why it is as popular as it is today.

Are you looking to get a better understanding of how WordPress works? Without a doubt, WordPress is the most-used website builder around today.

In fact, we’ve put together a large list of WordPress facts, figures, stats, and trivia to give you a more profound appreciation of just how far WordPress has come.

For those that may have remembered from more than fifteen years ago, WordPress actually just started out as a mere blogging platform.

Thanks to continuous improvements and upgrades to its core, numerous options for customization, and its worldwide community of dedicated and passionate fans and followers, WordPress today is now the most popular Content Management Platform as far as websites go.

How Popular is WordPress?

If you are a blogger, a website developer, or a small business owner trying to create your web page for the first time, you will surely come across WordPress at some point in your process.

For those who do not know yet, WordPress is a content management software (CMS) used to help create and manage your website.

Since launching in 2003, the highly competent software tool has helped millions of users maintain and promote their websites.

Here is a quick timeline on its progress over the last nine years:

The Popularity of WordPress

A product’s merit and reliability can be measured by how many of its users find success, and the numbers don’t lie for WordPress.

• Of the top one million websites on the internet, 297,629 of them use WordPress.

• In the top 100,000, WordPress makes up 22,111 users.

• If you look deeper into the top 10,000 sites, you will find that 2,645 of them are on WordPress.

Those are solid figures for flexing power and caliber in the field.

(Source: BuiltWith.com)

Other Stats on WordPress Usage

• WordPress powers 37% of the web. (WordPress.com)

• WordPress is behind 30.3% of the world’s top 1000 websites. (W3Techs)

• 22% of new domains in the US are run with WordPress. (Hostt)

• There are more than 1.1 million new registered WordPress domains every 6 months. (Builtwith.com)

• WordPress is, by far, the most used CMS. Compared to other content management systems such as Joomla or Drupal, WordPress enjoys a sizeable market share at 60.2%.(W3techs)

• WordPress is the fastest growing CMS, with roughly 500+ new sites being built daily in the top 10 million websites on the web (compared to Shopify’s and Squarespace’s 60-80). (W3Techs)

• With 163 million unique visitors per month, WordPress is more visited than Twitter, which gets “only” around 156 million unique visitors per month. (Automattic)

• Content creators and bloggers from all around the world make approximately 70 million new posts and 77 million new comments each month. That’s about 27 new posts per second! (WordPress.com)

• WordPress is searched for 2,940,000 times every month by people from all over the world. (KWFinder)

• WordPress dominates google’s SERP with 2.28 billion results. (Digital.com)

• WordPress is available in 196 languages. (WordPress.org)

• English is the most used language to write content on WordPress. Spanish is second with 4.7% and Indonesian is third with 2.4%. (WordPress.com) 

Is WordPress Really That Good?

Yes, we’d like to think so.

As the data above suggests, WordPress has continuously grown its market share by a consistent margin, and it is showing no signs of stopping anytime soon. 

As of 2020, it is the most popular CMS tool available, with a whopping 37% market share of all websites on the world wide web. In the global management content market alone, WordPress has a dominating 60.2% in shares.

These figures are not surprising, given that more than 60 million people have chosen to use it to support their websites.

Brands and Businesses Using WordPress

The quality of the users of WordPress also speaks a lot about its standing in the business.

Top brands like The Chicago Sun-Times, BBC America, Time Magazine, New York Post, Mercedes Benz, Sony Music, USA Today, Mircosoft News Center, NBC, Spotify, and CNN, among others, all use WordPress.

WordPress is just as popular with non-business brands, as several educational institutions are also on the platform.

Harvard Blogs, the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard University, University of Melbourne, Georgia State University, Cornell University, UCF College of Medicine, University of California-Berkeley, and MIT are a few examples of academic bodies who are using the software.

WordPress’s brand has even reached celebrity levels, as several stars utilize it to keep connected with their fans online.

Comedians Gabriel Iglesias and Russell Brand, tennis superstars Maria Sharapova and Serena Williams, legendary action stars Sylvester Stallone and Steven Seagal, and global music icons Beyonce, Jennifer Lopez, Ricky Martin, Kylie Minogue, and Snoop Dogg have all selected WordPress for their website requirements.

WordPress Facts and Figures on Customization

One of the main reasons why people use WordPress due to its almost endless options on website customization.

The platform has more than 57,000 plugins and 4,000 themes to choose from, providing users more than enough choices to change how their website looks.

With record plugin downloads of over 1.25 billion and counting, WordPress has undoubtedly cemented its hold in the website management market. The massive number of choices can easily overwhelm the average user, so you can check the most-downloaded plugins as listed instead:

Most Popular WordPress Plugins

Contact Form 7

This plugin’s effectiveness can easily be backed up by having no less than 5,000,000 active installations. Contact Form 7 is an easy-to-use product where users can create basic contact forms and customize them as you please.

People who download this usually look into Akismet, too, since the latter integrates spam filtering flawlessly onto the contact forms.

Yoast SEO

If you are creating a website, you should already know how integral Search Engine Optimization (SEO) can be to your site’s success. Putting a priority on SEO right from the get-go is essential if you wish to stay competitive in the online market.

WordPress gives significant help in this region by rolling out several tools to improve SEO content on your website, including the very popular Yoast SEO.

Yoast SEO is quite user-friendly, which explains why it has more than 260 million downloads. Its user interface is easy to understand, and it comes with functions that help beginners configure their initial SEO setup and optimize their pages for better exposure.

Wordfence

Wordfence is WordPress’s primary firewall and security scanner designed to protect websites from thousands of malware, malicious code and web content, and other harmful threats.

More than three million users currently have the plugin installed. That number should only climb higher as WordPress continues to launch real-time security solutions to strengthen online security further.

JetPack

With an all-time download total of 190 million, JetPack is another plugin guaranteed to improve your website. It provides basic security services to help guard your site, and at the same time, contains various optimization tools to keep your pages at top performance.

Downloading JetPack gives you access to several features, such as the ability to generate advanced website statistics so you can better understand your audience.

This plugin also utilizes SEO tools to extend your reach through recognized platforms like Facebook, Google, and Twitter.

WooCommerce

This powerful e-commerce plugin has helped more than a hundred million users to market and maintain their digital stores. By integrating with well-known marketing and social channels such as HubSpot, Google Ads, and Facebook, WooCommerce increases your visibility and expands your business considerably.

WordPress consistently rolls out free and paid extensions to develop WooCommerce, giving users plenty of options to enhance their websites. This focus on quality has paid off significantly, as WooCommerce has topped e-commerce usage on the internet with a 14.31% share on the overall market. Inside the top one million e-commerce sites, WooCommerce is still in first place with a 4.67% share.

Other Popular WordPress Plugins

There are six other plugins that have reached at least seven million downloads. You can check WordPress Importer, WP Super Cache, NextGEN Gallery, Google Analytics, All in One SEO Pack, and Google XML Sitemaps if you wish to explore more reliable WordPress products.

The Popularity of Premium WordPress Themes

ThemeForest, one of the more popular companies specializing in premium themes, has reported that:

• 50% of all WordPress themes in their inventory have made at least $1,000 in a month,

• 25% have made at least $2,500 in a month,

• 15% have made at least $5,000 in a month,

• 7% have made at least $7,500 in a month,

• and 5% have made at least 10,000 in a month.

They’ve also reported that over 70% of premium WordPress theme searches are focused around niche industries (as opposed to general-purpose themes). (Envato)

Other Stats on WordPress Themes and Plugins

• There have been 36 major versions of WordPress released since the platform’s inception. (CodeinWP)

• Gutenberg brought about the largest change to the WordPress visual editor since the beginning of the Content Management System. (Kinsta)

• 22% of WordPress sites are running on the latest version of WordPress. (Torquemag.io)

• Major upgrades to WordPress are released every 152 days, and each release is named after a jazz musician. (CodeinWP)

• There’s a plugin for that: the WordPress Plugin Directory currently lists over 57,000 plugins with 1.5 billion total downloads. (WordPress.org)

• Among some of the most popular plugins are 19 that have reached the 1+ million active installs mark: Hello Dolly, W3 Total Cache, Contact Form 7, Really Simple CAPTCHA, All in One SEO Pack, Google Analytics by Yoast, Google XML Sitemaps, WordPress Importer, Regenerate Thumbnails, WooCommerce, WP-PageNavi, WP Super Cache, Jetpack, TinyMCE Advanced, NextGEN Gallery, Wordfence Security, Yoast SEO, Advanced Custom Fields, Akismet.(WordPress.org)

• WooCommerce powers 28% of all online stores worldwide, with over 30 million downloads so far. (WooCommerce)

• CodeCanyon reported that 80% of plugin searches are focused on functionality (i.e. sliders, forms, calendars).
  While you already have tons of WordPress plugins for free, there’s still quite a market for premium plugins. (CodeCanyon)

• According to CodeCanyon, of the 6,000+ premium WordPress plugins on the site, Visual Composer, Slider Revolution, LayerSlider, and UberMenu are the best sellers. (CodeCanyon)

• WordPress has a lot of themes available for free. Among the 10 most popular free themes on WordPress.org, only 4 come from third-party developers (not developed by WordPress.org or Automattic). They are: Hestia, Mesmerize, Sydney, and OceanWP. (WordPress.org)

• Why are premium WordPress themes so popular? That’s because a fully customized WordPress website can cost anywhere from $1,000 and $100,000, depending on your brand’s website requirements. (Post Status)

• A premium WordPress theme has an average price of $40. (CodeinWP)

• The most popular and most purchased WordPress theme on ThemeForest is Avada. Avada costs $59 and it has sold over 200,000 copies so far. That’s about $12,000,000 in sales to date, and counting. (Avada)

• Divi, Avada, and Genesis are the three most popular WordPress themes when it comes to the number of installations. Together, they have 17% market share. (BuildWith.com)

Stats on WordPress Security

As the top CMS, WordPress is also the number one target for hackers. In a study that included 8,000 infected websites, 74% were created on WordPress.

While most of these attacks occurred due to third-party vulnerabilities, WordPress is fully aware of its status and regularly develops new ways to protect customer websites.

According to statistics, 8% of the hacked WordPress websites had a weak password. Using extremely common access codes such as 12345678 or password allowed hackers to get into their sites easily. Some affected WordPress sites were not kept up to date for a long time, which gave hackers a chance to slip into the unpatched holes in the system.

WordPress constantly upgrades its security through plugins like Wordfence to ensure its users receive up-to-date protection.

Over the last thirty days alone, Wordfence has blocked over four billion attacks on WordPress sites while blacklisting 190,000 malicious IPs in the process.

If ever the system detects a severe vulnerability on a website, WordPress employs an Auto-Update System to update its current settings and push automatic plugin upgrades quickly.

There is no system entirely immune to hacking, but WordPress does the best it can do to keep its client websites from harm.

• As of July 2020, Akismet reported that it has blocked a landmark 500 billion spam messages since it started doing so almost 15 years ago. (Akismet)

• The latest version of WordPress, WordPress 5.5, has been downloaded more than 7 million times. (7,646,822 to be exact!) (WordPress.org)

• Less than 1/3 of all WordPress installations are updated to the latest version (5.5). Only 23% of users have actually done so. More than 27% still use version 5.2. (WordPress.org)

Other Fun WordPress Facts and Figures

• WordPress has 501 times fewer employees than Amazon. Many of these employees are scattered all over the world, working completely remotely. (Automattic)

• The average WordPress web developer earns over $50,000 a year (Payscale.com)

• The first ever WordCamp was organized in San Francisco by Matt Mullenweg in 2006. There have been over a thousand (1,063) more of these locally-organized WordPress community events to date (and counting). (Wordcamp)

• According to Google’s Matt Cutts, “sites built with WordPress are capable of ranking higher in search results because the CMS takes care of 80-90% of Google’s crawling issues.” (Matt Cutts)

A Final Word

With all these interesting WordPress facts, figures, and stats we’ve combined, we certainly hope you’ve had a new-found appreciation for this highly influential content management system.

Indeed, WordPress is a world-class website-building solution that have helped millions of people, brands, and businesses achieve their marketing and communication needs.

(Compiled by Team LOJO; written by Michael Ramirez with additional copy and editing by Renzie Baluyut.)