WordPress is celebrating its 20th birthday on May 27, 2023.
WordPress has influenced many since it was created in 2003. It makes information accessible to everyone worldwide, provides jobs and espouses diversity, equity and inclusion.
Here are the WordPress facts and usage stats that show its impact on the world.
WordPress 101
WordPress is an open source content management system (CMS) that powers over 43% of websites in the world. It’s free for download on WordPress.org — just connect it to a domain name and a web hosting provider to get your website online. WordPress also has its own hosting solution, WordPress.com, but it has limited features.
Have you ever wondered about the origin of WordPress? In 2002, a blog software called b2/cafelog was discontinued. This inspired users Mike Little and Matt Mullenweg to give new life to the code. They called their version WordPress.
Since then, it’s become the most popular CMS in the world. WordPress powers all types of websites, ranging from personal blogs, portfolios, eCommerce and news.
WordPress facts
- WordPress powers 43.2% of websites worldwide
- WordPress is the fastest-growing and most popular content management system, with a 63.3% market share in the CMS sphere
- WordPress websites get over 20 billion page views each month
- The WordPress economy was projected to be worth $635.5 billion in 2021
- WordPress developers are highly paid, earning $38.73/hour on average
WordPress usage statistics
According to W3Techs, WordPress has grown an average of 2.96% each year for the past decade. Despite being the world’s most popular blogging platform and website builder, WordPress is still increasing its dominant market share in the CMS market.
Each month, WordPress sites produce 70 million new posts and receive:
- 409 million unique visitors
- 20 billion page views
- 77 million new comments
U.S. English is the most widely used language on WordPress at 44.2%, while Japanese and Spanish are a far second at 5.9% each.
Some of the most popular brands that use WordPress include:
- Microsoft
- The Walt Disney Company
- Forbes
- Meta Newsroom
- Mozilla
- Sony Music
- TechCrunch
- The New York Times Company
WordPress isn’t just a great platform for bloggers. It’s also used to create websites for educational institutions, government agencies, eCommerce, nonprofits and health care. Let’s explore some of them.
Educational institutions using WordPress
A 2021 report from eQAfy found that WordPress has a 40.8% market share of U.S. higher education institution websites.
The study looked at December 2020 data from the National Center for Education Statistics’ IPEDS database, which contained 4,000 active institutions. From there, eQAfy was able to find the CMS of 3,359 websites.
WordPress’ dominance isn’t limited to just the education sector. It led the pack among all types of institutions, sizes and year levels.
Government agencies using WordPress
WordPress also powers many government agency websites. These include The U.S. Department of State and the U.S. Embassy websites for the UK, Australia, Japan and China. Plus, the most high-profile U.S. government website uses WordPress: WhiteHouse.gov.
The White House’s website switched from Drupal to WordPress in 2017.
Government agency websites have major requirements for security and scale — which WordPress can fulfill. WordPress’ enterprise platform, WordPress VIP, has been awarded FedRAMP ATO status. That means it meets the U.S. government’s security standards.
Did you know WordPress has a special theme designed specifically for government websites? It’s called GovPress.
Nonprofits using WordPress
WordPress’ open source nature aligns with nonprofits. By making its code free and accessible to the public, WordPress gives organizations a low-cost way to build their own websites.
WordPress also supports nonprofit-specific functions such as fundraising and managing donations with plugins like Charitable and GiveWP. There are also hundreds of themes made for nonprofits, such as the Charity Foundation and Act themes.
Check out some examples of nonprofit sites using WordPress:
WordPress’ Five for the Future program asks companies to donate 5% of their resources to invest in WordPress’ continued development.
WordPress community
The WordPress community is an inclusive and diverse one. Its parent company, Automattic, has almost 2,000 employees speaking 123 languages in 97 countries.
Below are some of WordPress’ community activities and initiatives.
WordCamps
WordCamps are WordPress’ flagship events, organized by volunteers. These gatherings are nonprofit — speakers don’t get paid. Ticket prices are low and used to cover venue, food and other costs.
WordCamps were born from WordPress meetups — small in-person gatherings between WordPress fans. Currently, WordPress’ official account on Meetup has over half a million members in 114 countries.
Matt Mullenweg organized the first WordCamp in San Francisco in 2006. As of writing, there have been 1,151 WordCamps in 385 cities within 65 countries across six continents.
If you miss a WordCamp, you can:
- Watch replays of talks on WordPress.tv
- Check out Bluehost’s WordCamp recaps
- Attend other popular WordPress events such as PressNomics, WooConf and WPCampus
WordPress translation
WordPress is available in 208 locales. There are language packs for 130 of them.
If your locale is one of the 78 without a language pack, the Polyglots team is probably translating WordPress in your language. You can join the Polyglots team to help.
As of writing, 55 of these locales have translation projects that are more than 50% complete. 72 locales are less than 50% along the way and eight don’t have a WordPress project.
WordPress has been celebrating WordPress Translation Day on Sept. 28 since 2016.
Accessibility
The WordPress community is committed to making the internet as inclusive and accessible as possible for all users. This means any user’s device or ability should have the chance to share or access content on WordPress.
The Accessibility Team checks whether WordPress themes conform with WordPress’ Accessibility Coding Standards. Those standards mean all WordPress code must comply with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.1 at level AA.
WordPress economy
WordPress has contributed heavily to the global and digital economy. Many people have gotten jobs, made a career and started businesses from the WordPress ecosystem.
WP Engine, Vanson Bourne and the Institute of Management Studies (IMS) at Goldsmiths, University of London did research to measure the impact of the WordPress economy. They found it was worth an estimated $596.7 billion in 2020 and projected to be worth $635.5 billion in 2021.
If the WordPress economy was a company, it would rank seventh among the largest market caps in the world. That’s larger than Meta and Tesla.
Let’s look at how WordPress has impacted the digital economy.
WordPress job opportunities
Digital Acce collected data from Indeed and Glassdoor and found out what the most available and in-demand WordPress jobs are:
- WordPress developers are responsible for implementing WordPress websites, plugins, and themes. They are the highest-paid profession for WordPress and make up the majority (65%) of available jobs for the platform.
Dev salaries range from $24,000 to $150,000 (depending on experience level). WordPress development requires specialized skills in programming languages such as PHP, JavaScript, HTML and CSS. - WordPress content creators produce all kinds of content for WordPress websites, including blog posts, articles and multimedia. High-quality content is important as it encourages people to engage with your website, share their impressions, value your brand and find you on search engines.
Content creators make up 21% of WordPress jobs and earn an average salary of $51,000. If you want to be a WordPress content creator, brush up on skills such as writing, video editing and search engine optimization (SEO). - WordPress designers create custom designs that are aesthetically pleasing and offer useful functions to website visitors.
WordPress designers make up 8% of the platform’s jobs and have an average salary of $50,000. Their skill set isn’t as common as that of devs. Designers are more concerned with web design and user experience (UX). - WordPress support specialists troubleshoot website errors and provide technical assistance to WordPress users. Support personnel should be familiar with WordPress and have tech skills similar to WordPress devs, but also social and communication skills to aid customers.
Support specialists comprise 4% of WordPress jobs and their average salary is $47,000. - WordPress project managers oversee various aspects of a WordPress project, including design, development and content creation.
Project managers make up only 2% of WordPress jobs but are among the highest paid at $68,000 per year because their skill set is rare. They need to know a bit about everything related to WordPress.
WordPress ecosystem
WordPress software doesn’t work on its own. To create a website, you need web hosting, domains, themes and plugins — all of which contribute to the WordPress economy.
WordPress hosting
According to market share, the most popular WordPress website hosts are:
- Newfold Digital (6.7%), which includes brands like Bluehost, HostGator and iPage
- WP Engine (5.0%)
- SiteGround (4.5%)
Some web hosting companies, such as Bluehost, offer hosting specifically for WordPress. That’s a specialized type of hosting that optimizes for a WordPress website’s speed and security needs.
WordPress hosting often comes with SSL certificates and a domain name, which other hosting providers might sell separately.
If you need web hosting, WordPress considers Bluehost one of its most trusted providers.
WordPress plugins add functionality to websites. You can choose from over 60,000 free and premium plugins in the WordPress plugin directory.
The most popular WordPress plugins of all time include:
- Yoast SEO, which helps you improve your website’s SEO
- WooCommerce, from WordPress’ parent company Automattic, adds eCommerce functionality to your website
- Akismet, also from Automattic, this plugin protects your website from spam
- Jetpack, an all-around marketing and security plugin — again, by Automattic
WordPress themes
WordPress themes are templates and stylesheets that define how the website will visually appear. There are more than 10,000 free themes available in the theme directory.
WordPress’ latest default theme is Twenty Twenty-Three. It’s block-based and works well with the platform’s Full Site Editing feature.
Users can also buy premium WordPress themes on marketplaces like ThemeForest. Among the top one million websites, the most commonly-used themes are Divi, Astra and Elementor’s Hello. But the most popular WordPress theme of all time is Avada, which has over 890,000 users.
WordPress software
WordPress is built on PHP and MySQL. It’s licensed under the GPLv2, which means it’s free to use and modify.
WordPress has advanced a lot since it started in 2003. Let’s look at the evolution, security and updates of WordPress software.
WordPress security
Security is crucial because WordPress sites process and store millions of people’s data. It’s generally a secure platform, but it’s not without its share of security issues. Because it’s the most widely-used CMS, it’s also the most targeted for attacks.
Wordfence estimates its plugin blocked 90 billion malicious WordPress login attempts in 2020. That averages 2,800 attacks each second.
One of the best and simplest ways to keep WordPress secure is by regularly updating your plugins, themes and core.
WordPress core updates
Two or three times a year, WordPress releases a major update named after a jazz musician. The latest version is WordPress 6.2, called Dolphy, released in March 2023.
As of writing, over 50% of WordPress users are using version 6.2. The remaining half have not yet updated their WordPress core.
Around 3% of WordPress websites are still running WordPress 4.9 or earlier. That means they don’t have access to the Gutenberg block-based editor.
Want to stay in the loop about all things WordPress? Check out the Bluehost blog for monthly WordPress updates and news roundups.
Gutenberg facts and stats
Gutenberg is a block-based web design editor first introduced in 2018, appearing on WordPress 5.0. Since then, there have been 80.8 million active installations and 281.8 million posts written — it’s common that over 200 thousand posts are written daily using Gutenberg.
The most popular Gutenberg block is the paragraph, used 56.5% of the time. Here are the rest of the top 10 Gutenberg blocks used on WordPress:
WooCommerce facts and stats
WooCommerce is a popular eCommerce plugin used to build over 3.9 million online stores, including 23% of the top one million eCommerce sites. It has a 38.74% market share of leading eCommerce platforms and software worldwide.
When the 2020 pandemic hit, the majority of small businesses had to shift to an online platform. Many were able to adapt, thanks to WordPress’ and WooCommerce’s ease of use.
According to Mullenweg’s 2020 State of the Word address, WooCommerce facilitated $20 billion in sales that year alone.
Final thoughts: WordPress statistics and facts that show its impact (2023)
These WordPress statistics show how impactful it’s been over the last 20 years.
No matter what industry you’re in, when you’re looking to build a blog, portfolio, company website or eCommerce site, WordPress has you covered
If you’re ready to build your WordPress site, you’ll need a reliable web hosting solution like Bluehost. With secure features, a variety of plans and a price you can’t beat, you’ll see why WordPress highly recommends Bluehost.
Sign up for a Bluehost WordPress hosting plan today.
