WordPress is already on the good way to become the most popular CMS ever. WordPress usage statistics in May 2017 are quite impressive and the numbers are quickly going up on a daily basis. Worldwide statistics shows that more than 30% of sites are built with WordPress, while all other content management systems are far behind without any chance to take over the throne. The Joomla usage for instance is around 2.9% which is quite low and I wouldn’t be surprised if one day they completely stop rolling out updates.
WordPress is founded in 2003 and since then, this widely popular platform evolved so much that anyone can install it and use it in matter of minutes, without any programing skills. If you want to know how many websites exactly are using WordPress, I’ll have to disappoint you with the fact that there are no official statistics available. The rough estimate of active installs is around 81 million with more than 2.9 billion published posts.
So the WP market share is huge, enormous with more than enough potential to go over 45% because more and more people are switching from other CMS’s to WordPress, which is definitely a good decision, on a long-term basis.
To this day, there’s exactly 49,993 plugins listed in WordPress plugins repository and again need to mention that no other CMS have so many free add-ons for literally any feature you can think of. WP managed to cover everything, from all possible angles, so no wonder that their popularity will continue growing rapidly toward more and more happy users.
The best way to illustrate how quickly the numbers are going up is to take a look at official WordPress downloads counter. WordPress 4.7 has been downloaded more than 73 million times, the more precise figure is around 73,054,584. And here we’re talking only about the latest version downloaded from official WP site and updates are not included in this number. So, since 4.7 version rolled out, approx. 73 (+ -) million new WordPress sites are online.
WordPress Usage Statistics and other data
- 81+ million sites
- 2.9 billion posts
- 49,000+ plugins
- 47.2 million comments per month
- 29 billion monthly pageviews
- 77 million WordPress.com blogs
- 32 new posts are published each second
- Less than 50% of WordPress sites are up to date (core, plugins)
- 72 translations available
- 49 scheduled WordCamps in 2017 in more than 30 countries
Google monthly searches for WordPress
We can also measure the WordPress popularity by checking the Google search statistics and all the keywords related to WP.
The average monthly searches for the keyword “WordPress”, are from 1 million to 10 million on a global level. The second most popular keyword with 100K – 1M searches is “wordpress themes” which is completely understandable, everyone wants a nice theme for their site. All other top searches are mostly related to themes, design, wordpress expert services, hosting and plugins.