10 Surprising Statistics About WordPress Usage

There’s no disputing the fact that WordPress is by far the most prominent CMS out there. The brainchild of Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little, WordPress has risen to superstardom in the blogosphere in the 11 short years since it was released.

You might be thinking that you already know just how popular WordPress really is. Think again, because these 14 WordPress usage statistics may well give you pause for thought.

1. 48% of Technorati’s Top 100 Blogs Are Managed With WordPress

When you consider that there are is an enormous amount of alternative content manage systems available, this statistic speaks volumes about WordPress popularity.

If you decide to go with WordPress, you will definitely be with good company. The New York Times, CNN, Mashable, and eBay all run their blogs on the most popular CMS in the world – WordPress.

2. 74.6 Million Sites Depend on WordPress

Yep, you read that right. 74,652,825 sites out there are depending on good ol’ WordPress. That’s one site per person in Turkey.

Around 50% of this figure (close to 37 million) is hosted on the free WordPress.com. In the realm of self-hosted sites, WordPress accounts for 18.9% of all websites. That’s even more astounding when you consider that over 70% of sites worldwide do not use a CMS.

3. WordPress-Related Keywords Score 37 Million Searches Per Month

The keyword “WordPress” alone receives over 450,000 exact match searches every month. That’s just “WordPress”, not “WordPress help” or “WordPress plugins” or anything of the sort.

When you count the searches of all keywords with WordPress or WP (a common abbreviation for WordPress) in them, the monthly figure is a whopping 37 million searches. Assuming that this figure remains constant, WordPress will get 444 million searches in 2014. That’s nearly one and a half times the population of the U.S.

WordPress is searched five times as much as Joomla and nine times more often than Drupal.

4. 40 Translations of WordPress

While the actual number isn’t half so mind-boggling as the others you’ve just read, it is no less significant. If English isn’t your first language and you would rather have Croatian, Dutch, Estonian, French or Finnish (see full list of WordPress translations) governing your dashboard, you’re in luck.

If you don’t happen to speak one of the forty languages listed and you are more comfortable with something else, hold on tight. The WordPress team is actively updating their list with new language translations all the time.

5. 22% of New U.S. Registered Domains Run on WordPress

Out of every 100 domains registered in the U.S., 22 of them will be run on WordPress. Considering that an average of 120,000 domains are registered worldwide per day, it’s safe to say that WordPress is growing by leaps and bounds.

That “18.9%-of-all-website” figure is increasing all the time.

6. WordPress.com Gets More Unique Visitors Than Amazon (Us)

WordPress.com records an astonishing 126M unique visitors per month, while Amazon falls quite a ways behind, clocking in at 96M uniques per month.

7. WordPress.com Employs Only 229 People

It’s hard to believe but true. The site that receives 130% the unique visits of Amazon employs only 229 people. To keep that in perspective, Amazon.com employs 88,400 people to run their business, 38,603% more than WordPress.com.

That is probably one of the reasons why they’re always looking for new developers to join their team.

8. 6 New WordPress.com Posts Every Second

That’s right. Every second, close to 6 (the actual figure is 5.7) new posts are published on WordPress.com blogs. That averages out to 342 posts per minute. Just above 20,000 per day. And a grand total of 7.49 million annually.

Not only is WordPress.org the world’s most popular self-hosted CMS solution, but the free version is also second in popularity on the list of free blogging platforms, with Google’s own Blogger topping it.

There’s a neat map view on the WordPress.com site that shows you the location of a blogger as he publishes a post in real-time. Check it out.

9. WordPress Developers Charge $50/hr

A 2012 survey revealed that the average rate for a WordPress project clocks in at $50/hr. It’s nothing to write home about, but $50/hour is a decent sum for most.

oDesk, one of the most popular outsourcing sites in the world, lists WordPress development as the fifth most-requested skill. Freelancer.com, a similar website, has thus far recorded over $3.5M in revenue for WordPress developers.

WordPress development is clearly a valuable skill to learn — one that can definitely pay off in the future. The need for it won’t be going anywhere for a while.

10. 29,000 WordPress Plugins and Growing Daily

Without doubt, the number one feature that sets WordPress apart from any other CMS is their plugins. Plugins extend and capitalize on the functionality of WordPress — removing access to them would cripple WordPress users (and that’s one of the reasons why WordPress.com falls second to Blogger).

Fortunately, nothing of the sort is happening. On the contrary, WordPress.org’s database of plugins has recently hit 29K and a new one is added nearly every hour. In total, these plugins have been downloaded 286,000,000+ times. Give it a few years and all you’ll be hearing is “there’s a plugin for that”.