Cancel

Jeff Chandler

WordPress Now Used on 30% of the Top 10 Million Sites

W3Techs, a survey company that monitors usage of various web technologies, is reporting that WordPress has reached 30% usage or 60.2% market share of all the websites whose content management systems it knows about. This represents a 0.6% increase since February 1st and 13.1% over the last seven years.

Just five days ago, Matt Mullenweg, co-creator of WordPress, brought attention to the approaching milestone.

When it comes to WordPress’ market share numbers, W3Techs is the most cited source. While some say that WordPress now powers 30% of the web, technically, it is used by 30% of the top 10 million sites based on traffic according to Alexa. All sub-domains on WordPress.com and WordPress.org count as one site.

The internet is larger than the top 10 million sites. According to Internet live stats, there are close to 2 billion sites on the internet although a majority of them are inactive.

W3Techs’ numbers show that WordPress’ use is growing on sites that receive a lot of traffic and shows no signs of slowing down as it makes its way towards 50%.

Category:
Tags: , ,
15

15 responses to “WordPress Now Used on 30% of the Top 10 Million Sites”

  4. I find this misleading….but everytime this kind of stat come out, no one has the numbers for what percentage is .com and what is .org separately. Those are the numbers I (as well many others) want to see.

    Create forum topic from comment

    • What do you mean, it’s right in the article?

      > “All the subdomains of http://wordpress.com and http://wordpress.org do indeed only count as one site. Sites that are hosted by Automattic under their own domain do count if they have significant traffic on that domain. These are 0.4%, 29.5% are hosted somewhere else.”

      In short, none of the foo.wordpress.com sites count towards this metric and the only .com sites that do have a custom domain (and the wp.com sites with custom domains are 0.4% of the total).

      Create forum topic from comment

      • In that case, the “WordPress powers 30% of the internet.” banner on WordPress.com is really misleading.

        It should either be changed to 0.4%, or link the CTA button to WordPress.org.

        It’s borderline bait and switch. You’re telling people that the open source WordPress software powers 30% of the internet, but the signup link takes people to your own proprietary version (.com) that actually only powers 0.4% of the internet

        Create forum topic from comment

  5. Like other companies such as Microsoft and Taco Bell, WordPress is clearly obsessed on being the most “popular” in its niche, not the “best.” Matt Mullenweg has unfortunately adopted a quantity over quality business model. It’d be nice if Matt switched to obsessing with making WordPress more end-user friendly and less burdensome and expensive to maintain. But he seems to believe that whatever you don’t like about WordPress can be solved with someone else’s plug-in. Because plug-ins can and should solve every problem, right?

    Create forum topic from comment

  6. I actually dig both Microsoft and Taco Bell, but putting that aside, WordPress is free in both its license and effectively in its price as well. Its biggest competitors according to W3Techs are also free, like Joomla and Drupal.

    Given price isn’t a distinguishing factor and the other similarities among the top three, I would posit that quality is the primary driver of adoption and market share. It’s a free market expressing its preference. Popularity doesn’t mean something is bad, especially in economics of abundance (which the world is moving to).

    Create forum topic from comment

    • You “dig” Taco Bell? Because it’s the highest quality Mexican “inspired” food available to you, or because it’s the most “popular” and “cheapest” Mexican inspired food? Either way, I doubt you choose Taco Bell for special occasions or important business meetings. But at least Taco Bell is supposedly one of the healthier fast food chains. Of course that’s not saying much. :)

      As far as WordPress, it’s not at all “effectively” free to use, unless you barely use it. As you’re well aware, to properly use WP for a business site, you need to research, purchase, and maintain several plugins and themes, plus pay thousands per year for professional design and maintenance services. WordPress, like Joomla and Drupal, is basically a bespoke application. But like what happened in the revolution of the auto industry, as the web industry matures, people are increasingly demanding far more user-friendly website solutions. You don’t dispute that do you? Don’t you also agree that 99% or so of non-techie business owners cannot build a proper WordPress-based website? I would call a 99% failure rate a major cause for concern. That’s why I push back against web people who falsely claim it’s super easy for business owners to build and maintain a WordPress-base website.

      Create forum topic from comment

      • Whilst some of this may be true – I believe Gutenberg / properly using the customizer is addressing a lot of this. My last production project for a small business had 9 plugins in total – this includes backups, security and antispam.

        Also my client was able to edit content before we did our training just by jumping and and editing it from Gberg – proof it does work well.

        Create forum topic from comment

      • @Rhys Clay

        Sounds good. But about how much do you charge for a business website?

        My main beef is with web pro’s who falsely advertise WordPress as a super cheap and easy way to build a DIY business website. It takes experienced and talented web pro’s like you to build a proper WordPress-based business website.

        I also think Matt Mullenweg is trying to make WordPress so dominate, that both business owners and web pro’s, will feel they don’t really have a choice. In other words, it seems Matt is trying to monopolize website building. I think that would be very harmful to consumers and businesses. That’s why there are laws and policies against monopolies. Imagine if there was only a few theme companies to choose from, or only a few hosting companies to choose from.

        Create forum topic from comment

      • @Scott
        WordPress is asolutely free to use. You have no idea at all how many hours and hours are dedicated to bring to life a complex open source project that is given to you for absolutely nothing. I find it a bit disrespectful to write such a statement maxime when those assets you talk about are not affiliated with WordPress source developers.

        On topic: 10 million is a more than enough sampling.

        Create forum topic from comment

  8. WordPress does have a huge influence on most of the world. But in China, most site building companies still are using very old Chinese CMS. I’ve been using wordpress for 3 year, I feed it is much much better than other Chinese CMS. Hope someone can see this and pay more attention to let more people in China know and use wordpress. If so done this well, I don’t think 40% even higher is very far.

    Create forum topic from comment

You may also like

Newsletter

Subscribe Via Email

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.