WordPress Statistics and Facts

WordPress is by far the most popular open-source content management system (CMS) the internet has ever known.

What is even more impressive about WordPress is how much it has evolved since it was originally released in 2003. 

As WordPress continues to grow, so does its user base and functionalities. What started as a platform for bloggers, is now a multi-purpose CMS with an impressive collection of plugins and themes.

WordPress is utilized by news organizations, e-commerce companies, and many other businesses worldwide. It actually powers around 43% of the websites on the internet.

This staggering number is a clear indicator that WordPress is a potent CMS that has significantly altered the digital marketing landscape.

If you want to boost your online presence, whether you’re a blogger, marketer, or business owner, you need to understand this platform to make the most of it.

So, exactly how many WordPress themes and plugins are on the market? How many unique visitors and page views does WordPress have? What are the most critical WooCommerce stats?

In this article, I’m going to present the most noteworthy WordPress stats and figures for 2024. Let’s get started!

What We Know About WordPress So Far

Before we get into the nitty-gritty of WordPress stats, it’s important to take a step back and look at WordPress’ impressive history.

So, how did it all begin?

Like many tech revolutions, WordPress started with a brilliant idea from an ordinary guy looking to solve a personal problem.

In 2002, college student Matt Mullenweg installed the b2/cafelog blogging platform for his own use. 

Due to personal reasons, the original creator of b2/cafelog had to stop updating his brainchild, leaving the project and its community without a leader.

In 2003, with Mike Little, Matt created a new version of the b2/cafelog system on SourceForge. 

Fun fact: Christine Tremoulet, a friend of Matt’s, suggested the name “WordPress,” and they decided to use it.

It was clear to Mullenweg and Little that they needed to create a more sophisticated personal publishing mechanism than the b2/cafelog system. This novel idea generated a new, fresh approach to making websites.

WordPress surpassed 50 million blogs in July 2011 and, with a 59% market share in 2013, it became the most widely used CMS worldwide. 

Here are the most important awards and recognition WordPress has earned over the years:

• 2008 “Best of open source software awards: Collaboration” winner from InfoWorld.
• 2009 “Overall Best Open Source CMS” winner of the Open Source CMS Awards.
• 2010 recipient of the “Hall of Fame CMS category in the 2010 Open Source” award from digital synergy.
• 2011 recipient of InfoWorld’s “Bossie award for best open source software.”

WordPress Site Stats

Now that we’ve gone through a brief history of how WordPress was born, it’s time to take a look at some more practical statistics.

With an impressive 42.9% ownership of all the internet’s websites in 2022, WordPress continues to grow in popularity year by year, which is why an average of 661 new WordPress sites are created every day.

If this whopping number wasn’t impressive enough, have a look at these general WordPress stats which will assure you that it is here to stay:

• WordPress is the most widely used content management system worldwide. 
• WordPress hosts approximately 43% of the internet’s websites. (W3Techs)
• WordPress adds about 1.1 million new domains every six months, according to a survey from 2015 of global internet CMS usage.
• WordPress has 70 million new posts and 77 million new comments each month. (WordPress)
• W3techs’ data indicates that WordPress holds a 64.3% market share. Joomla is the second-most popular CMS but is far behind with only 2.5%.
• A quick glance at the WordPress translation page reveals 208 languages, with 41 having 100% translation. 
• 71% of all WordPress content is written in English, with Spanish coming in second place. (WordPress Activity)
• WordPress 6.0 has been downloaded more than 95 million times until now. (WordPress Download Counter)
• Each second, 17 blog posts are published on WordPress. (WordPress Activity)
• The keyword “WordPress” is globally searched around 2.9 million times every month. (Ahrefs)

WordPress Theme Statistics

Part of WordPress’ huge success is due to its highly customizable nature, allowing users to create functional and attractive websites.

Users have complete control of their website’s aesthetic with the help of WordPress blog themes.

The platform is miles ahead of its rivals because of this amazing feature. Offering countless options to exercise your creativity and create the website of your dreams.

If you’re not sure how to choose the best theme for you, check out my article on the best WordPress blog themes.

With more than 10 million free themes to choose from, you can be sure you’ll find one that suits your needs.

But before deciding on which WordPress to adopt for your website, check out these interesting statistics:

• WordPress offers 10,045 free themes to its users. With so many options to choose from, you can be sure to find the proper theme to convey your style. (WordPress theme repository)
• There are around 221 theme companies. (ScepterMarketing)
• The average price for a WordPress theme is about $77. (ScepterMarketing)
• 93% of WordPress blog themes from Envato Market are responsive. (Kinsta)
• There are approximately 8,000 WordPress themes that can be downloaded and used for free. (Thrivemyway)
• Avada is the most popular WordPress blog theme, with more than 700k people trusting it.
• Choices is the most used WordPress theme, with 34,443 websites using it, or 3.4%, according to Builtwith. In second place is Divi, with 17,032 websites using it, followed by Popper.
• ThemeForest is the most popular premium WordPress theme marketplace, with more than 11,000 WordPress themes. 

Credit source: Manaferra.com

By the way, I have an entire article dedicated to the WP Astra theme review. Check it out!

WordPress Traffic and Usage Stats

Not only is WordPress the most popular CMS, but it is also growing incredibly fast. 

Compared to other managed platforms like Shopify or Squarespace, WordPress is far above in terms of users, powering over 600 of the top 10 million websites on the internet.

Undoubtedly WordPress is extremely popular around the globe as the following staggering traffic and usage statistics clearly illustrate.

• WordPress is by far the fastest-growing CMS, with more than 661 new websites being created every day. (W3Techs)
• The most popular companies that publish content via WordPress are TechCrunch to TED, CNN, and Spotify. (WordPress Activity)
• WordPress had 409 million unique visitors with more than 20 billion page views each month. (WordPress Activity)
• The latest version of WordPress has been downloaded over 96 million times and the numbers are growing each second. (WordPress)

Credit source: W3techs

WordPress Community Statistics

Due to its high-quality features, WordPress has managed to gain trust and keep users engaged with constant updates and improvements. 

As a consequence, this CMS has established a strong and dedicated global community of professionals who share the same interest in the platform.

For example, WordPress has an annual community-organized conference called WordCamp. This is an excellent opportunity to learn more about WordPress.

• WordCamp is an annual community-organized conference focused on everything WordPress.
• The total number of WordCamps continues to grow, with more than 1,123 arranged globally across 379 cities, 65 countries, and 6 continents.
• On August 5, 2006, the first WordCamp was hosted in San Francisco, California. What began with 500 brave participants and only lasted one day, has now become a worldwide phenomenon. (Themeisle)
• WordPress’ official support forum has over 2,030,000 topics. (WordPress support)

Credit source: WordPress

WordPress Plugins Statistics

To assist users to customize the WordPress CMS to their particular needs, plugins increase the platform’s core capabilities. 

Users can modify WordPress to suit their needs thanks to the market’s abundance of both free and commercial plugin alternatives.

Plugins are one of the reasons WordPress is so adaptable. Shopping carts, contact forms, speed improvements, SEO analytics, and security are only some of the most used WordPress plugins. 

Below are the most crucial WordPress plugin stats every marketer, blogger and business owner should be aware of before starting their journey with this CMS:

• There are currently 60,179 WordPress plugins with billions of total downloads, and new ones are added daily. (The Plugin Directory)
• Between April 15, 2016, and April 16, 2019, there were 18,262 plugins published. Of those, approximately 18.3% have never been updated and only 0.16% of all the plugins analyzed have surpassed 100,000+ active installations. (IloveWP)
• Approximately 68% of WordPress plugins released in the past three years have less than 100 active installations. (IloveWP)
• 6% of plugins have a homepage link, while approximately 47% of plugins have a donate link. (IloveWP)
• Yoast SEO is the most popular plugin, with over 5 million active installations and five-star ratings in the WordPress plugin directory, alongside Classic Editor and Elementor Website Builder.
• Due to both the advancement of technology and the sheer volume of plugins available today, plugin usage has increased significantly over time.
• The average percentage of users who leave a review for a WordPress plugin is 0.20% (Matteoduo)

Credit source: Manaferra.com

Here are the most popular WordPress plugins by active installation:

• Yoast SEO – 5+ million 
• Jet Pack – 5+ million 
• Elementor – 5+ million 
• Contact Form 7 – 5+ million 
• Wordfence Security – 4+ million 
• UpdraftPlus – 3+ million

Here are the most prominent WordPress plugins by number of downloads:

• Elementor Page Builder – 10,000,000+ downloads
• Classic Editor – 1,000,000+ downloads
• Companion Auto Update – 1,000,000+ downloads
• Constant Contact Forms – 1,000,000+ downloads
• Duplicate Page – 1,000,000+ downloads

WordPress Podcast Stats

With the podcast industry forecasted to exceed $94.88 billion by 2028, and an estimated 424.2 million podcast listeners worldwide in 2022, there’s never been a better time to start a podcast with WordPress.

Starting a podcast is an incredibly powerful method of driving brand awareness, reaching new audiences, and increasing your traffic.

Combining a reliable podcast hosting service with a customizable WordPress podcast plugin, will get you started on the right foot.

But before going down that road, you should be aware of some WordPress podcast popular opinion:

• Dixie is the most popular WordPress theme for starting a podcast because it has a large banner graphic that displays the most recent episode and an automatic play option.
• A user-friendly and adaptable podcast plugin is Seriously Simple Podcasting by Castos. 
• The best WordPress podcast players are Smart Podcast Player and Podcast Player.

WooCommerce Statistics

WooCommerce is a free open-source plugin that enables users to turn their WordPress website into an online store. 

It was launched in 2011 and has gained massive popularity since, especially among small and medium-sized businesses.

WooCommerce offers a number of practical elements that any business needs to succeed, like beautiful themes, subscriptions, shipping options and much more.

The following is a list of prominent WooCommerce statistics:

• WooCommerce is the most popular eCommerce plugin for WordPress, with 2.7% of all eCommerce websites being powered by it. (BuiltWith)
• WooCommerce is still one of the most popular options among the top 1 million websites on the internet, but only with a 14% market share. (Kinsta)
• The WooCommerce plugin is used by at least 5 million websites and has been downloaded over 210 million times, with numbers rising daily. (WordPress)
• WooCommerce supports 66 languages, nearly twice as many as Magento (30) and Shopify (20). (WordPress)
• Around 28% of all online stores and 93.7% of WordPress eCommerce sites are powered by WooCommerce. (WebTribunal)
• On WordPress.org alone, there are more than 6,000 WooCommerce plugins. (PluginRepublic)
• WooCommerce’s GitHub repository has more than 1,000 contributors. 
• According to research done by the head of WooCommerce in 2017, total sales from WooCommerce account for nearly $10 billion. (WPTavern)
• There are more than 1,100 WooCommerce themes in the WordPress.org Theme Directory.

Credit source: WordPress

WordPress Security Stats

Although regarded as one of the safest options in terms of CMS, WordPress is still the subject of data breaches, just like any other website.

WordPress websites are the primary target of malware infestations, as these security statistics demonstrate.

• WordPress was used to create around three-quarters of malware-infected websites. (Sucuri)
• In 2020, there were more than 4.3 billion attempts to exploit vulnerabilities in WordPress. (Wordfence)
• 39.3% of hacked WordPress websites were done so using an old version. (Sucuri)
• Weak passwords are the cause of 8% of WordPress website hacks. (WP Hacked)
• The majority of WordPress security flaws come from plugins. (Key CDN)
• In 2016, the top most hacked WordPress plugins were Revslider, Gravity Forms, and TimThumb. (Sucuri)

Credit source: Sucuri

WordPress Earning Statistics

Now that we’ve been through all of these WordPress stats and figures, I’m sure you’re wondering if there are any ways to earn an income through WordPress.

Let me tell you this. WordPress offers a variety of attractive revenue streams for those who want to supplement their income.

Among the most common ways to make money with WordPress are as; a developer/designer, plugin/theme maker/developer, hosting company, SEO professional (or agency), or you could start a WordPress maintenance service.

Here are some of the most eye-catching WordPress earning statistics:

• On Envato Market, 50% of WordPress theme creators earned at least $1,000 a month, while 5% made $10,000 or more. On Envato Market, less than 4% of all themes have earned less than $1,000. (Winningwp)
• The hourly rate for WordPress developers can range from $30 to $175, with an average of $70. (Uplers)
• 25% of freelance WordPress users make a living out of it. (Truelist)
• The average yearly WordPress developer’s salary is $59,706 in the United States. (Uplers)

Unlock the True Power of WordPress

Without a doubt, WordPress is one of the most beloved content management systems in the world, and for good reason.

Launched more than 15 years ago, WordPress has grown into a massive blogging platform that has won users’ hearts thanks to its features.

The main differentiator between WordPress and other blogging platforms is that it empowers users to start their own blogs and even make money while they’re at it.

I hope this run down of the most fascinating WordPress statistics has given you a fresh perspective on this important CMS.

The WordPress stats and data presented above can help you keep up to date on the CMS’ state at the moment and project how it might develop in the future.