2024’s WordPress Market Share Report – Latest Trends + Usage Data

Selecting the right content management system (CMS) is a crucial step for businesses and individuals venturing into the online world. While popularity can be a factor, a deeper understanding of market share, usage trends, and platform capabilities is essential for informed decision-making.

Here at WPBeginner, we use WordPress ourselves but also understand the need for data to support your website creation choices.

This article provides a comprehensive analysis of WordPress usage statistics, market share research, and other relevant data. We will explore factors that contribute to WordPress’ dominance in the CMS landscape, exploring its ease of use, extensive functionality, and robust developer ecosystem.

Whether you’re a business owner, marketer, or simply someone seeking an effective online presence, this data-driven approach will shed light on the strengths and value of WordPress, ultimately helping you make an informed decision for your website creation.

The Basics: What is WordPress?

WordPress is an open source software that allows users to make a website. It is available for download as free software and can be installed on any WordPress hosting company.

It’s important not to confuse WordPress (the software) with WordPress.com, which is a hosted solution. To learn more, see the difference between WordPress.com vs. WordPress.org in our side-by-side comparison.

It all started when two users of a blogging software called b2/cafelog decided to take the software in a new direction.

The idea was coined by Matt Mullenweg, who was then joined by Mark Little, and together, they released the first version of WordPress on May 27, 2003.

Since then, WordPress has evolved from simple blogging software to a CMS, website builder, eCommerce platform, and more.

To learn more, see our article about the history of WordPress.

WordPress is a community software, and thousands of users from all over the world have contributed to it by submitting code, fixing bugs, translating, testing, and helping others use it.

Let’s take a look at some WordPress stats and facts to see how WordPress is helping people do great things on the internet.

How Popular Is WordPress?

WordPress is immensely popular and is used by millions of people all over the world. Here are some numbers to put things in perspective.

1. WordPress powers more than 43% of all websites on the internet.
2. It also holds 64.3% of CMS’s market share. No other website builder software comes close.
3. WordPress powers websites for big name brands, including Disney Books, Sony Music, Time Magazine, Meta Newsroom, and more.
4. 36.28% of the top 10,000 websites are powered by WordPress.
5. More than 22% of all new domain names in the United States are running WordPress.
6. Each day, more than 1000 new WordPress sites join the top 10 million websites tracked by W3Techs.com.

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

For example, Shopify is the second most popular, but it’s only 1/10th the size of WordPress since it powers about 4.4% of all sites vs WordPress 43.2%.

Wix spends tens of millions in marketing, but it only powers 2% of all websites. This means WordPress is 22x more popular than Wix.

Other popular CMSs all have under 2% market share each, such as Squarespace (2.1%), Joomla (1.8%), Drupal (1.2%), Blogger (1%), and Magento at just 0.81%.

For full details, see our CMS market share report.

When it comes to popularity, there’s no comparison to WordPress. According to the usage statistics, WordPress market share is 3X larger than the usage of the other 9 popular website builders and blogging platforms combined.

WordPress Plugins

The biggest reason behind WordPress’ popularity is its large plugin & extensions ecosystem.

Plugins are like apps for your WordPress website. You can install them to add new features to your site and extend its functionality. To learn more, see our guide on what are WordPress plugins and how do they work?

Here are some mind-blowing facts about WordPress plugins, which show just how massive the WordPress ecosystem is.

1. There are more than 59,537 free WordPress plugins on the WordPress.org plugin directory alone.
2. 8 of those plugins are installed on 5 million+ websites.
3. 61 top WordPress plugins are installed on more than 1 million websites.
4. The most popular eCommerce plugin, WooCommerce, is installed on more than 5 million websites as per the WordPress plugin directory since it shows all counts above that as 5 million +. According to W3Techs, WooCommerce’s market share is 9% of all websites, making it more popular than Shopify for online stores and eCommerce sites.
5. The popular WordPress form plugin, WPForms, is also installed on more than 6 million websites. According to BuiltWith, it’s used by over 1.12% of the top 1 million websites. It’s the fastest-growing form builder on the entire internet.

Our plugin stats are from the official WordPress.org plugin directory alone. Many plugin developers sell premium versions of their plugins from their own websites.

With a healthy plugin ecosystem, you can add custom functionality to your website at a fraction of the cost of custom development.

There are free WordPress plugins available for just about every type of website functionality, including contact forms, selling memberships, landing page builder, SEO optimization, and more.

WordPress Themes

Themes control the appearance of a WordPress website. These are WordPress-specific website design templates that you can install on your website to change its look.

There are thousands of free and paid WordPress themes available, offering WordPress users an endless combination of design, layout, color schemes, and features.

1. Themes were first introduced with WordPress 1.5 back in 2005, with the first new default WordPress theme called Kubrick
2. Just like plugins, there are both free and paid WordPress themes that you can install.
3. WordPress.org’s free theme directory has more than 11,719 free WordPress themes.
4. According to BuiltWith, Hello Elementor is the most popular theme among the top 1 million websites and is used by 1.17% of websites analyzed by their service.
5. Thousands of themes are sold by commercial WordPress theme shops with an average price of $40 per theme.
6. Elementor is the most popular WordPress page builder in the market. Elementor market share is now 14.1% of all WordPress sites. Although we use and recommend SeedProd because it’s faster and lets you build fully custom WordPress themes without any code.

WordPress Hosting

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

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 WordPress.

Here are some popular WordPress hosting companies based on market share:

1. WP Engine (36.7%) – one of the leading managed WordPress hosting companies on the planet.
2. Hostinger (27.4%) – an affordable WordPress hosting company that’s growing in international markets due to its cheap web hosting prices.
3. Newfold Digital Group (4%) – this is a hosting conglomerate that includes brands like Bluehost, HostGator, Domain.com, and more.
4. GoDaddy Group (3.9%) – this includes brands like GoDaddy, Media Temple, Pagely, and many more.
5. SiteGround (2.1%) – a premium WordPress hosting company that users love because of their top-notch support. We use SiteGround to host the WPBeginner site.

The data above is from the W3Techs report and excludes other platforms like Amazon (AWS), Google Cloud, NameCheap, Automattic, and others. Our list above is representative of the reader polls on WPBeginner for popular web hosting.

WordPress Security

WordPress is the most commonly used CMS software in the world, which also makes it a common target of hacking attempts, DDOS attacks, malware, and trojans.

1. According to Sucuri, a leading website security company, 83% of all CMS-based websites that were hacked in 2017 were running WordPress. This number isn’t surprising, considering that WordPress holds 64.3% of CMS market share.
2. Sucuri also reported that 39% of hacked WordPress websites were using an outdated version of the software. That’s why you should always use the latest version of WordPress on your website.
3. Nearly 50% of WordPress sites are affected by a security vulnerability caused by an outdated or poorly coded WordPress plugin or theme
4. Around 8% of WordPress sites were hacked due to a weak password.

You can make your WordPress site as secure as possible by following some basic security best practices. To learn more, see our complete WordPress security guide for step-by-step instructions.

Often, the stats above cause WordPress to get a bad reputation, but the reality is that WordPress itself is not insecure. WordPress core goes through rigorous security audits, and it’s more secure than many other platforms out there.

The only fault WordPress has is that it’s popular, which leads to stats like above.

WordPress Community

WordPress has a massive user base spread all over the world. It is used by not just businesses but also governments, schools and colleges, non-profits, and more.

As an open-source project, WordPress is driven by a global community of users. This means that anyone can contribute to the project in many different ways.

1. WordPress translation community has it fully translated into 208 languages and partially translated into dozens more.
2. In 2017, WordPress communities around the world organized 128 WordCamp events in 48 countries and sold 39,625 tickets.
3. As of December 2023, WordPress.org reported about 506,338 members across 783 Meetup groups globally.
4. There are dozens of WordPress groups on Facebook, with WPBeginner Engage being the largest WordPress Facebook group with over 97.2k members.

If you want to contribute to WordPress, then see our guide on how to get involved with the WordPress project.

The WordPress Economy

WordPress has a thriving multi-billion dollar ecosystem that creates thousands of jobs all over the world. This also includes freelancers, developers, and companies that sell WordPress-related products and services.

1. At the time of writing this article, the freelancer.com website alone had 16,596,952 WordPress jobs posted for USD only, and out of these, 9,995 were open.
2. Thousands of WordPress jobs are currently open on many popular freelancing websites. You can always visit our Careers page to find WordPress jobs.
3. The average hourly rate for WordPress developers can be anywhere between $20-$100 per hour, depending on their expertise and the job at hand.
4. A custom WordPress theme with its own unique design and plugins can cost $10,000, and it may increase depending on the project’s requirements.
5. There are hundreds of small and large businesses, agencies, and developers selling WordPress-related products. See our list of the most influential WordPress businesses and companies and what they do.

We hope this article helped you discover some new WordPress stats, facts, and interesting research. You may also want to see our article on the best domain registrar and best business phone services for small businesses.

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