WordPress continues to grow as the CMS (Content Management System) of choice on the Internet.  It also ranks as the fastest growing CMS as well!

Two years after WordPress usage reached 20%, it achieved the next major milestone: 25% of all websites now use WordPress. Or, as its founder Matt Mullenweg puts it: Seventy-Five to Go.

The dominance of WordPress in the CMS market is amazing. The two closest competitors, Joomla and Drupal combined are used by 4.9%, less than a fifth of WordPress. — W3 Techs

 

WordPress is used by some of the best known websites: Time, TechCrunch, Wired andLifehack, to name just a few. When we split up all websites by traffic level, we see that WordPress is leading at all levels, but the market share among the top 1000 sites is significantly lower at 30.3%. Drupal (19.7%) and Adobe Experience Manager (11.8%) are the other dominant systems in that section. Note, however, that using a standard CMS is not very common among the top 1000 sites, more than 90% of them are custom developments.

We have indicators that show that WordPress is likely to grow even further. In October, 29.5% of new sites used WordPress. New sites usually show the way where the whole market is heading to.

If we look at sites that changed their CMS technology recently, we see that WordPress is mostly gaining from Joomla, Drupal and Blogger. There are also systems that gain more sites from WordPress than they lose, most notably Magento, Squarespace and Shopify, but compared to the overall WordPress user base, these numbers are almost negligible.

WordPress is not only the most popular CMS, it is also the fastest growing system: every 74 seconds a site within the top 10 million starts using WordPress. Compare this with Shopify, the second-fastest growing CMS, which is gaining a new site every 22 minutes.

Splitting up the whole web into sections by content language reveals further interesting facts: WordPress is used by a staggering 37.3% of English language websites. Usage numbers are between 38% and 40% for Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish and Turkish sites, and they reach 51.3% for Bengali and 54.4% for Bosnian. On the other hand, that number is only 10.6% for Chinese language sites and 6.9% for Korean.

Looking at the underlying technologies used by WordPress sites shows that 93.8% of them use a Unix-like operating system, with Ubuntu being the most used Linux distribution. Only 6.2% of WordPress sites use Windows. That is sufficient, however, to make WordPress also the dominant CMS running on Windows servers, ahead ofDotNetNuke and SharePoint.

With its double freemium model based on open source software and free site hosting, WordPress and Automattic are one of the big success stories of the web. It looks like we have only seen the beginning yet.

Source:  W3Techs