26% of the Web Runs on WordPress

WordPress is known the world over for being the best content management system. New reports show that an astounding 26% or a fourth of the total websites around the world use WordPress to power their sites. Its competitors lag far behind with Joomla and Drupal capturing a scarce five percent of all the websites on the internet. And, that’s not all. In the coming years, WordPress is all set to grow even more. Are these reports really accurate? Let’s find out.

W3Techs

W3Techs is an organization that studies the technologies different websites use by evaluating their market share and usage. It uses a very systematic and detailed procedure to assess them. Not only does it study entire websites but also any page using a particular technology is considered as using the content management system. W3Techs also takes care to carefully exclude the possible impact of spammers. Instead of scanning the entire web, researchers have chosen to study only the top 10 million websites. These websites have been chosen according to the popularity grading evaluated by Alexa in which the performance of websites over three months has been averaged.
To further ensure that the results of the study are accurate, W3Techs has chosen to omit sub domains and count the sub domains of wordpress.com as a single website. The company also eliminates redirected domains. For instance, since Sun.com directs users to Oracle.com, it is excluded from the study. Finally, it has different criteria for categorizing websites as such and this is why the actual number of websites it has studied number less than 10 million. Matthias Gelbmann at W3Techs estimates that in the coming years WordPress is likely to dominate more of the entire web. It will further amaze you to know that the latest figures collected on June 27 2016 show that WordPress controls 26.5% of the websites in the world.

How WordPress Compares

Considering the many websites that are opting to move to WordPress from their existing content management systems, it is startling to see that users are moving over from Blogger, Drupal, and Joomla. They are also choosing to use plugins like Shopify, Squarespace, and Magento, which is even more interesting. Reports also note that one site in the top 10 million bracket adopts WordPress every 74 seconds. In addition, the second fastest growing content management system gains a fresh website every 22 minutes.

Future Prospects

WordPress is all set to gain new heights of popularity. This is because there are at least 57% websites that are not using any particular content management system. Given the ease of usage of WordPress, the possibility of them adopting it or some of the other open source systems is immense as Matt Mullenweg, founder of Automattic opines. While there have been slight variations in the growth numbers from month to month, the overall impact of WordPress seems to be rising over the years.

Findings of CodeGuard

W3Tech is not the only organization to recognize WordPress as the leader in content management systems. CodeGuard is an online security company that supervises small businesses. It reports that the 250,000 or so small businesses that have websites have managed to earn a market share of 79% thanks to their usage of WordPress.

Because of its awesome popularity and the fact that it is capturing the lion’s share of the business across the world, WordPress has become the target of cyber attacks. It has also had to deal with some security problems that it is doing its best to overcome. Users need only to download the latest versions of WordPress to ensure the safety of their websites. Developments like these indicate that WordPress is committed to offering the best of content management systems to websites all over the world.

Moving forward, one can expect that in the upcoming years, WordPress is poised to become the one-stop solution for the marketing requirements of businesses anywhere and everywhere in the world.