Over two years ago, we published an infographic featuring the unbelievable growth of WordPress. As you very well know, anything that happened two years ago in the tech industry is ancient history. We decided it was time to re-visit the topic. A lot has changed over those two years. The dominance of WordPress has not.
To date, WordPress remains the most popular content management system (CMS) on the web. Even as the internet has grown and evolved around the platform, WordPress’ market dominance has remained both unchanged and (relatively) unchallenged. If anything, it’s more popular than ever, with over 60 percent market share among CMSes.
Even conservative estimates place the number of websites running WordPress at nearly 64 million. That’s nearly 34 percent of all websites on the Internet. At this point, the platform’s biggest competition isn’t other CMSes, but websites that don’t use a CMS.
And that gap is closing. In the last five years, WordPress’s market share grew by a whopping 38 percent. That growth shows no signs of stopping, either. WordPress users publish approximately 42 million new posts and leave 60.5 million comments on a monthly basis.
It isn’t just in North America that WordPress has left its mark, either. The WordPress.org software is available in 57 languages. In 2017 alone, WordPress hosted 4,379 meetups in 73 countries and 128 WordCamps in 48 countries.
The popularity of the recently released WordPress 5.0 is a testament to its staying power. Within the first 48 hours of its release, it received nearly 3 million downloads. That number exploded to 7 million by the time WordPress 5.2 was released two weeks later.
What makes WordPress so popular? To put it simply, it’s the platform’s versatility, owed largely to its plugin ecosystem. WordPress allows you to build any type of website you could possibly envision. A blog, an art portfolio, a digital storefront — if you want to create it, there’s a plugin and theme that will make that possible.
But I’ve gushed enough about WordPress. If you want to learn more about WordPress’s market leadership and see more unbelievable statistics like those above, check out our latest infographic below.
