BuiltWith Reports a 7% Increase in WordPress’ Usage from January – July 2015

photo credit: Luis Llerena

BuiltWith, the popular service dedicated to monitoring internet technology trends and providing platform usage analytics, released its bi-annual internet coverage report for CMS usage from January – July 2015. The report shows that WordPress, which accounts for 48% of total CMS’s tracked, added 1.1 million domains since January.

WordPress has been found on an additional 1.1 million domains since January but only accounts for a 7% increase in customer base. Whereas Ghost was added to 2,184 domain home pages and accounts for a 17% increase in their customer base.

The title of the summary is “CMS Market Share Increases by Install Base,” but WordPress is the only CMS shown in the chart with an actual market share value assigned based on its place among tracked competitors.

BuiltWith indexed 328,852,063 domains during this quarter. Instead of simply showing the increase by usage numbers, the summary focuses on the percentage increase in customer base for a more interesting comparison. When commenters noted that this is not, in fact, market share data, Ghost co-founder John O’Nolan replied, “Relative growth compared to existing size is pretty much the only sane measure.”

@JohnONolan Strange perspective. Ghost added 17% or 2,184 domains. WordPress added 7% or 1,149,956. That's only 535 times more sites ;)

— Aigars Silkalns (@AigarsSilkalns) July 7, 2015

Oddly, the report did not share any figures for Drupal or Joomla, which W3techs estimates as WordPress’ closest CMS competitors in terms of market share. BuiltWith’s summary appears to be limited to the fastest growing platforms based on percentage increase in customer base.

The CMS report also included some interesting stats on the WordPress versions it detected on sites indexed. These numbers roughly correspond to the project’s version usage stats, although WordPress doesn’t publish numbers for versions older than 3.0. BuiltWith found that 1748 websites are still running on WordPress 2.1, released eight years ago. This number is down 259 sites since the beginning of the year.

photo credit: BuiltWith

According to Gary Brewer, founder of BuiltWith, “Wix and Squarespace’s main acquisition for existing websites that are using a CMS are from WordPress sites.” He also notes that WordPress continues to dominate without the help of celebrity advertisements. Wix’s ad with Heidi Klum and Squarespace’s Jeff Bridges commercial, which aired during the Super Bowl, are evidence of both companies’ massive marketing budgets. WordPress.com, the world’s leading provider of free WordPress sites, has yet to explore that route.