WordPress is the most popular content management system in the world, so it’s very popular.

WordPress dominates other markets, such as e-commerce, so it’s definitely not just for blogging.

And to show you where these conclusions came from, we’ve collected some amazing statistics about WordPress’s market share, as well as the market share of two of the most popular e-commerce plugins for WordPress – WooCommerce and Easy Digital Downloads.

Market share is 43% of all websites.

According to W3Techs, WordPress powers 43% of all sites on the Internet, including those without a content management system (CMS) or a custom CMS. Or, in other words, WordPress operates over a third of the web! And if you limit the data set only to websites with a known CMS, WordPress market share becomes even more dominant.

In this case, WordPress has a 65% market share for content management systems on websites with a known CMS. How does this compare to the market share of other popular content management systems?

Is WP only used by a lot of small sites?
Not! To learn more about how market share is divided, we turned to BuiltWith. BuiltWith lets you see your market share for websites that meet certain criteria, such as being in the Top 10k of Quantcast (a list that tries to collect the 10,000 most trafficked sites on the Internet).

Here’s how  does market share when you segment by Quantcast rank:

• Quantcast Top 10k – WordPress sites have a market share of 38.03%.
• Quantcast Top 100k Sites – WordPress has a market share of 35.94%.

If you compare this to WordPress’s 35% global market share, WordPress is even more popular among high-traffic websites.

Is market share still growing?

Yes! Market share is not only “growing, but it’s actually growing steadily, at about the same rate, as long as we have data. So how fast is WordPress growing? Let’s start with the numbers for last year.

At the beginning of 2017, WordPress powered 27.3% of all websites. By December 2019, WordPress had reached its current market share of 35.2%. A few quick maths should tell you that WordPress has swallowed another 7.9% of the total website market – good for a ~ 28.94% increase.

How does the growth of WP compare to other content management systems?

So WP is growing … but growing faster than the competition? This is a more difficult question to answer. In terms of self-hosted content management systems, WordPress is still the leader in growth.

While these are impressive statistics, the only way to truly understand the popularity of WordPress is to look at it in relation to other popular content management systems.

For example, Shopify is the second most popular, but it is only 1/10 the size of WordPress, as it feeds about 4.4% of all sites compared to WordPress’s 43.2%.

Wix spends tens of millions on marketing but feeds only 1.9% of all websites. That is, WP is 22 times more popular than Wix.

Other popular CMSs all have less than 2% market share each, such as Squarespace (1.8%), Joomla (1.7%), Drupal (1.3%), Blogger (1%), and Magento at just 0, 6%.

When it comes to popularity, there is no comparison with WP. According to usage statistics, WordPress’s market share is 3 times higher than the use of 9 other popular website creators and blogging platforms combined.

 Security

WordPress is the most commonly used CMS software in the world, making it a common target for hacking attempts, DDOS attacks, malware, and Trojans.

According to Sucuri, a leading website security company, 83% of all CMS-based websites that were hacked in 2021 were running WordPress. This number is not surprising given that WP holds 65% of the CMS market share.

Juice also reported that 39% of pirated WP sites used an outdated version of the software. That’s why you should always use the latest version of WordPress on your site.

Nearly 50% of WP sites are affected by a security vulnerability caused by an outdated or poorly coded WordPress plugin or theme

About 8% of WP sites were broken due to a weak password.

Hosting

WordPress is a self-hosted website creation software. In other words, you need a web hosting provider to create a website with WP.

Due to its popularity, many hosting companies have added specialized WordPress hosting services to make it easier for small business owners to get started with WP.

Here are some popular hosting companies based on market share:

New fold Digital Group (4.9%) – This is a hosting conglomerate that includes brands such as Bluehost, HostGator, Domain.com, and more.

GoDaddy Group (4.2%) – This includes brands such as GoDaddy, Media Temple, Pagely, and more.
WP Engine (2.3%) – one of the most important WordPress hosting companies on the planet.
SiteGround (2.0%) – a premium WordPress hosting company that users love because of their top support. We use SiteGround to host the WPBeginner site

Here’s to the world’s most popular CMS

While the growth of hosted website builders like Squarespace, Wix, and Shopify is something to pay attention to, all the numbers add up to one conclusion:  without a doubt, the world’s most popular way to build a website.

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