49 WordPress Statistics to Know in 2024

The majority of websites are designed with WordPress, the most famous CMS in the world. This is what most people know about WordPress. But as the most used CMS in the world, there are many other statistics to know about its use.

In this article, we will present you with many graphs and statistics that illustrate this CMS. If you want to know more about WordPress and why it’s been so dominant since its inception, all of these numbers will give you some insight. 📊

What is WordPress?

WordPress is a content management system or CMS. In short, it allows you to create a website without knowing how to code. Founded in 2003 by Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little, WordPress is today the most used CMS in the world.

WordPress is free. It is an open source software, which means that it is free to use and modify. To download WordPress, simply go to WordPress.org .

However, there is also a paid version of this CMS, named WordPress.com. The latter is simply a hosted version of the content management software.

The different statistics and facts about WordPress

Now that you know a little bit more about WordPress, we’re going to reveal the main facts and statistics you need to know about this CMS. However, we are not just going to talk about the number of users. There are many other stats about WordPress that you should know, especially if you want to make a living from the internet.

Using WordPress around the world

WordPress is the most used CMS in the world. It represents approximately :

• 65% of CMS market share with Shopify , Wix Joomla and others.
• But in terms of websites, a total of 43% of them use WordPress.

If the CMS is popular with small bloggers, it is also used by large websites.

Indeed:

• 30% of the top 10,000,000 largest websites in the world use WordPress. Knowing that to be part of the top 10,000,000, it is necessary to have a fairly large site.
• In the 10,000 largest sites in the world, 38% of them use this CMS. But we don’t stop there, because WordPress is also used by some web behemoths. 💪
• Among the 100 largest sites in the world, 14% of them use WordPress. This is for example the case of the TED blog, Microsoft News, BBC America or the PlayStation website.

All sites created with WordPress together reach as many monthly visitors as Amazon, the most visited site in the world. Each month, 2.7 billion(July 2022 – statista.com) visitors visit Amazon sites worldwide.

If WordPress is used so much and that for a big as well as a small website, it is above all because it is easy to use and gives access to many plugins. According to webmasters using WordPress, the speed of the CMS as well as the security are also elements that reinforced their choice.

Statistics on WordPress themes

On WordPress, there are thousands of different themes. These themes bring additional design and editing capabilities to the basic themes. As you probably know, you can find free or paid WordPress themes. Note that at the very beginning of WordPress, in 2003, there were no themes. They only appeared two years later.

There are over 9000 free themes available on WordPress.org and for paid themes, their average price is $40.

The most used themes are :

• Astra
• Avada
• DIVI(about 6% of WordPress sites use the DIVI theme)
• Hello
• OceanWP
• Sydney
• Betheme
• GeneratePress
• The7
• Porto

Statistics on extensions

If WordPress is used so much, it is partly thanks to the extensions or plugins it has. Clearly, these are additional features that are added to those already present on the CMS. For example, you can download a plugin to add a contact form, collect emails and more.

There are over 60,000 active free plugins on the WordPress.org extension catalog. There are about 6000 premium plugins. Indeed, as for the themes, there are free and paid extensions. Many also practice a freemium model with a free part and paid features as a bonus.

On average, a site uses 9 different plugins(study on 5 million websites / WPbeginner).

The most used WordPress plugins are :

Yoast SEO: This plugin allows you to optimize your site and its articles for SEO. Thanks to it, it is possible to add a sitemap or to modify titles and meta-descriptions for example.

Jetpack: One of the most popular and used plugins, Jetpack is an all-in-one extension. The latter allows you to manage the security, performance and design of a site. But it is especially known for improving the speed of page loading.

Akismet anti-spam: As its name suggests, Akismet is a plugin that aims to limit spam on a website. It is used to block unwanted comments and to secure contact requests.

WordFence Security: This plugin is a toolbox to manage all the “security” aspect of a website. It allows you to add a firewall to your site and block suspicious visitors.

Contact Form 7: One of the most downloaded plugins since the creation of WordPress. Contact Form 7 simply allows you to create contact forms, directly linked to an email address.

WooCommerce: This plugin allows you to create an online store from a WordPress site. Just like Shopify, WooCommerce offers the ability to manage payments, create collections, generate promo codes. Clearly, it is a way to design an e-commerce from A to Z, without using another CMS.

MonsterInsights: This is simply one of the plugins used to connect Google Analytics to its site. As a reminder, Google Analytics allows you to have a lot of data on the performance of your website(visitors, viewing time, bounce rate, etc.).

Elementor This is the most popular page builder. It allows you to create beautiful pages block by block. Elementor is mostly used to design important pages like a homepage, sales page or others.

Updraftplus: This plugin will automatically make backups of your WordPress site. For example, you can schedule daily or weekly backups, without having to log in to the administration part of the site. The plugin then takes care of sending the files to Google Drive, AWS, DropBox or others. Thanks to this, you will be able to restore your site in case of a problem.

Redirection: This plugin simply allows you to create 301 redirects, but also to keep track of all 404 errors. Redirection is one of the few such popular plugins that is completely free.

WP Super Cache : A lot of WordPress sites use a cache plugin. This type of extension allows you to speed up page loading time by displaying a static version of a page instead of loading it completely. WP Super Cache is one of the most powerful plugins and is therefore naturally very popular.

Statistics on Woocommerce

As you may have seen, WooCommerce is a plugin that allows you to build an online store on your WordPress site. Being one of the most used extensions, WooCommerce also brings a whole lot of impressive statistics.

A must-have plugin in the WordPress ecosystem, WooCommerce has been downloaded about 160,000,000 times:

• Every day, 30,000 additional sites download the extension.
• By 2022, 13% of online stores are using WooCommerce worldwide. 📦

Moreover, the business volume generated by all online stores using WooCommerce is $20 billion(2020 – Dothewoo).

WooCommerce is not just a simple plugin. It allows you to add a store to your site, but other extensions must be added to create a real e-commerce. Therefore, there are more than 4000 compatible plugins designed for WooCommerce.

Here are some of the most popular WooCommerce plugins:

WooCommerce PDF Invoices & Packing Slips: This plugin allows you to create invoices automatically and embed them in an order confirmation email.

YITH WooCommerce Wishlist : As the name suggests, this plugin allows buyers to create wishlists on a store.

Custom Product Tabs for WooCommerce : This plugin offers the ability to add custom tabs to a product page. You should know that a product presentation page is limited to 3 tabs(descriptions, additional information and reviews).

Stripe for WooCommerce : With this extension, you will be able to connect Stripe to your online store. As a reminder, Stripe is the largest payment processor in the world. It will allow you to accept credit card payments on your store.

Tidio Live Chat : This plugin allows you to add achatboxon your store. In other words, it will display a kind of messaging directly on your site to allow customers to have answers to their questions.

Pre Orders for Woocommerce : Nothing more simple, this plugin allows you to manage presales or pre-orders on a store.

WooCommerce Multilingual : This extension allows you to translate your entire online store. On the side, WooCommerce Multilingual offers the ability to add payment currencies.

EU VAT Compliance Assistant for WooCommerce : To be compliant with European laws, an online store must charge VAT on every sale. This plugin does almost all the work by taking care of adding the right VAT rate depending on the location and the product.

Statistics on web hosts

To be online, a WordPress site needs a web host . There are hundreds of web hosting companies around the world. Some specialize in WordPress and others provide all types of web hosting(shared, dedicated, VPS, etc.).

The most used hosting providers in the world(by number of hosted sites) are :

• GoDaddy
• CloudFlare
• Google Cloud
• IONOS by 1&1
• Amazon AWS
• Unified Layer
• OVH Cloud

WordPress Community Statistics

WordPress has been around since 2003 and has a growing community around the world. And to that end, many events are organized each year to learn, share knowledge and meet each other. 🤝

WordCampsare present all over the world. These events are organized by volunteers in a city or country. As you can see, more than 1000 WordCamps have been organized since the very first one in San Francisco in 2006.

There is a fee to enter a WordCamp, but the organization of this type of event is not for profit. Most of the time, a WordCamp lasts between 1 and 3 days and several conferences are given. All lectures are recorded and published on the WordPress TV site.

Statistics on WordPress and cybersecurity

WordPress is regularly presented as a secure CMS. The problem is that since WordPress is a very popular CMS, it also makes it a prime target for hackers. 👩‍💻

In 2017, 83% of sites created with a CMS that were hacked used WordPress. This in itself is logical, as WordPress has 65% of the CMS market share.

Obviously, no CMS is impassable for hackers. So there are some interesting statistics about hacks on WordPress sites. This in itself helps to determine the causes of the hacking.

According to a study by Sucuri:

• 39% of the hacked sites were using an earlier version of WordPress.
• 50% of the attacks occur because of a plugin or a theme not updated.
• 8% of sites were hacked because of a weak password. 🔑

Reading these stats, you may get the impression that WordPress is not secure. But if the number of hacked sites can be impressive, it is only because so many sites use WordPress. Thus, there are far more hacked WordPress sites than Joomla sites, because there are far fewer users.

The numbers on WordPress and its economy

WordPress is an ultra popular CMS used by many websites. As a result, many businesses have been built around this ecosystem. Indeed, there are a lot of people who live indirectly thanks to WordPress. 💰

Some companies founded solely to provide additional features to WordPress are making impressive revenues. The most profitable of these is Automattic. This company publishes most of the most used plugins on WordPress like Jetpack, WooCommerce or Akismet.

• Automattic has annual revenues of $700 million.
• Other WordPress-based companies are also very successful, such as Envato Market(selling themes, plugins, templates, etc.) with $100 million in sales.
• This is also the case for WPEngine(a hosting company specializing in WordPress) with over $200 million in annual revenue. 🤑

The three companies mentioned are each worth over $1 billion. In itself, there is a real economy around WordPress that supports much more than the employees of this CMS.

This is for example the case of WordPress developers, who thanks to this CMS can propose missions as freelance. The same goes for SEO consultants, designers, web writers or plugin and theme creators. But WordPress also allows many bloggers and website publishers to earn a living.

For example:

• a showcase site created with WordPress is charged between $3,000 and $15,000 in the United States(ManageWP).
• Next to this, a WordPress developer job earns an average of $66,561(Ziprecruiter – 2022).

Of all WordPress users, 25% claim to earn their entire living from the CMS. 🤩

In summary, it is important to understand that WordPress is much more than a content management software. It is a real economy, which allows many people around the world to earn money. The entire ecosystem is therefore worth several billion dollars.

Now you know more about the most used CMS in the world. If you want to learn step by step how to create a site with WordPress and monetize it, we invite you to download our free ebook. You will also learn the basics of website publishing and SEO affiliation.

As you can see, a quarter of WordPress users make their living with this CMS. If you want to be one of those 25% who can generate money online, we really invite you to download our ebook. ⤵️