WordPress is one of the most recognizable names in the world of web publishing and content management. WordPress is easy to navigate, free of charge to use and is the first choice for a content management system (CMS) for millions of users around the world. The two words that are most commonly associated with WordPress are blogging and open-source, while these terms are certainly relevant they only scratch the surface of the WordPress success story.
Over the years WordPress has become much more than a blogging tool. The latest data shows that WordPress powers 59.3% of all websites that use content management systems. In comparison, other notable content management tools like Joomla, Drupal, Magento and Blogger have market shares of 6.2%, 4.9%, 2.8%, and 2.6%, respectively. Evidently, this open-source CMS software has come a long way over the last decade, becoming the number one content management software on the market.
Usage statistics
The term ‘WordPress’ generates 1.6 billion results in Google, which highlights just how popular WordPress is. There are over 17 million websites currently powered by WordPress and the number of users is continually growing. It is estimated that the WordPress version 4.6 introduced in August 2016 has been downloaded 3.8 million times.
It has been calculated that users write about 69.8 million new posts in WordPress every month and the combined daily word count of WordPress blogs has been shown to exceed 542 million. If we look at the number of yearly page views across blogs on WordPress.com, we will notice a steady growth over the past several years. In 2013 the number of page views was 11.2 billion, the following year there were 15.8 billion views and 2015 records show that the number of page views reached 19.8 billion. Recent 2016 data shows that the number of page views this year reached 22.2 billion. This means that page views of WordPress-based blogs effectively doubled over a period of three years.
Themes and plugins
WordPress offers a wide variety of free themes and plugins. This makes WordPress one of the most flexible and customizable open-source content management software available. Currently there are 46,291 free plugins and 4,081 free themes available with WordPress. WordPress is regularly updated with new features so we can expect the offer of free plugins and themes to expand further. The free plugins like Regenerate Thumbnail, Akismet, WooCommerce, Yoast SEO, and Holly Dolly are the most popular among WordPress users. The top five most used free themes are Responsive, Customizr, Zerif Lite, Vantage, and Hueman.
The market for WordPress themes is extremely lucrative. Data obtained from the popular digital marketplace ThemeForest shows that half of all WordPress themes make over $1,000 a month. The data collected reported that 25% of themes earn approximately $2,500 per month, 15% make at least $5,000, 7% make a monthly profit of $7,500 and 5% of WordPress themes on ThemeForest make as much as $10,000 every month. Envato, the company that produces WordPress themes and plugins earned $400 million last year alone.
Hacking scandals
WordPress has it’s pro’s of being popular and profitable but, WordPress is not without its faults. The popular CMS has been at the center of several security breaches in the past few years, there have been concerns about user safety and data privacy on WordPress. The analysis of hacking trends for 2016 has shown that 78% of hacked websites that use CMS were powered by WordPress. There have been approximately 14% of hacks on Joomla-based websites, 5% of hacked sites used Magento, and only 2% were powered by Drupal.
In 2011 a large-scale hack resulted in 18 million WordPress users getting compromised. A similar attack took place three years later when more than 162,000 WordPress powered websites were used to launch a Distributed Denial of Service Attack. The following year, WordPress suffered another security setback when the CMS had to reset 100,000 passwords to protect its users after 5 million Google accounts were leaked online. What is not widely known is that websites built on WordPress played a major role in a recent Panama Papers leak of 11.5 million documents and 2.6 TB of sensitive data.
The Infographic
You can find more interesting facts about WordPress in the beautifully designed infographic below. This infographic uses accurate data from reliable sources and is a visually pleasing way to learn more about the leading content management software WordPress.
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