If you’re still not convinced that WordPress is the most popular content management system in the world, here’s a list of the most interesting statistics and information about WordPress as of November 2018. Let’s get straight to those statistics:
17 Facts About WordPress That Will Amaze You
1. WordPress powers about 33% of all websites on the internet
A somewhat amazing statistic, but WordPress, which was once a somewhat obscure content management system, now holds about 32.3% of websites on the net according to WordPress.com and w3techs.
The reason for this success is the unbeatable versatility of WordPress which allows it to spread across a wide variety of platforms, from personal blogs to small business sites to Fortune 500 sites such as Sony Music, MTV, and Forbes’ own blog.
WordPress leaves dust for other content management systems and enjoys a market share of about 59.5% from all websites on the net that use content management systems. The second content management system in the ranking is Joomla with about 6% and much further behind.
2. Users create 41.7M posts and 60.5M comments every month
That’s about 1,390,000 new posts every day, 57,916 every hour, and 965 every minute! Assuming an average post is about 300 words, we are talking about nearly 300,000 words written every minute of using WordPress.
Overall, the WordPress.com network welcomes more than 409 million people viewing more than 15.5 billion pages each month. Our users publish about 41.7 million new posts and leave 60.5 million new comments each month.
3. About 132 million spam comments are received on WordPress sites every month
Statistics from Akismet show that the number of spam comments generated in one month is four times the number of legitimate comments. In other words, WordPress is bombarded by 132 million spammers. Fortunately, Akismet succeeds in identifying 99.9 percent of those spam comments. Below is the number of spam comments blocked so far.
If you’re interested in knowing how to prevent spam, take a look at the post How to Prevent Spam on WordPress Sites Using the Akismet Plugin (relevant for both CF7 forms and for WordPress site comments).
4. More than 1.1M domains are registered for WordPress every 6 months
A survey conducted last year on global use of Content Management Systems (CMS) reveals that WordPress is responsible for about 1.1 million new domain names every six months or so. It seems that users really love the ease and convenience with which they can show an online presence through this system.
5. The word ‘WordPress’ is searched about 2,740,000 times every month
The tool KWFinder, which is a quite reliable tool for analyzing search phrases, shows that the word “WordPress” is searched by nearly 3M people worldwide every month. You can imagine what the number of searches would reach if we also add long-tail keywords containing the word WordPress to this number.
6. WordPress Meetups in about 60 countries
Meetups are small events organized by the local community under the umbrella of WordPress. In 2016, for example, there were 3193 Meetups in 58 countries including 62,565 people.
7. To date, there have been more than 1100 WordCamps
WordCamps are local conferences where discussions about all things WordPress and future innovations of this content management system take place. The first WordCamp was organized in San Francisco by Matt Mullenweg in 2006, and since then, there have been another 909 conferences around the world.
8. WordPress is translated into 57 languages
A quick look at the WordPress translation site shows that 26 of the languages are translated 100% while the total number of existing languages for WordPress is about 180. It’s interesting how long it will take until WordPress is fully accessible in all existing languages.
Take a look at the guide on how to create a bilingual WordPress site using Polylang.
9. WordPress gets more visits than eBay
With about 131 million monthly visits (Uniques), the domain WordPress.com gets more visits than the domain of ebay.com which enjoys “only” about 122 million visits (Uniques Visitors) per month as noted by Automattic.
| Monthly Visits (Us) | Number of Employees | |
|---|---|---|
| Google.com | 242M | 89,058 |
| Facebook.com | 210M | 30,275 |
| Amazon.com | 199M | 575,700 |
| Twitter.com | 152M | 3,500 |
| WordPress.com | 147M | 814 |
| eBay.com | 104M | 14,100 |
10. Amazon has 500 times more employees than WordPress
In the table from the previous section, you can see the number of employees at WordPress (Automattic) compared to other companies. It’s amazing to see where WordPress has managed to reach with just 460 employees at its disposal. Moreover, these employees of WordPress are spread all over the world and work entirely remotely, which in principle should make work more difficult.
11. About 6 new posts are created every second
If you take a look at the activity on WordPress.com, you’ll discover that bloggers around the world create roughly six new posts every second. That page also shows that about 71% of all content on WordPress is written in English. Spanish is in second place with 4.7% and Indonesian in third with about 2.4%.
12. The average annual salary of a WordPress developer is about $59,000
Statistics from PayScale.com reveal that an average WordPress developer earns just under $60,000 a year. And what about you?
13. There are currently about 55,850 plugins for WordPress
The plugin library currently contains about 55,850 plugins with 1,279,101,512 downloads. That’s about 1.3 billion downloads! Surely WordPress needs to remove some plugins that are no longer in use or have become obsolete. In any case, be sure that in most cases where you encounter a problem or want to achieve some functionality – you will find that there is a plugin offering a solution.
14. The latest version of WordPress has been downloaded 169,969,879 times
Version 4.9 of WordPress has been downloaded over 169,000,000 times. Just take a look at the following link to see the number of downloads of WordPress for this version and see how quickly the numbers rise.
15. Only about 2/3 of all WordPress installations have been updated to the latest version
Although WordPress encourages users to upgrade to its latest version, about 33% of all users still use older versions. All those users who hesitate to upgrade their site are risking breaches and theft of user information.
If you are among those people, take a look at the guide to securing WordPress sites which might raise your awareness of existing security risks as well as ways to block these risks and prevent breaches.
16. WordPress saves about 80% – 90% from Google’s scanning problems
Matt Cutts once said that sites built with WordPress could potentially rank higher because this content management system makes it easier for search engines to scan the site and saves about 80% – 90% of scanning problems that exist in other sites because of the way it is built. The bottom line is that WordPress is SEO friendly.
17. There is a WordPress theme that has brought in over $12M in sales
The most popular and best-selling theme on ThemeForest is Avada. The price of this theme is $59, and it has been sold over 200,000 copies, so the revenues from this theme are over $12,000,000 which is definitely insane, especially as it continues to sell…
Conclusion
I hope these statistics have helped to increase your appreciation for this system. WordPress is a unique system that helps millions of bloggers and website owners achieve their personal or business goals.
Are any of these statistics surprising to you? Let us know in the comments below…
