According to w3techs.com, 43.3% of all sites in the world are created using WordPress. And if we analyze sites created with a CMS, the number is even higher: today 65.3% of sites created with a content management system use WordPress! That’s right! Everyone, from the small blogger to the large multinational corporation, uses WordPress to manage their content.
The reach of WordPress extends far beyond its hosting service, WordPress.com (in English).
Founded in 2003 as a blogging tool, WordPress has grown to be a full CMS underlying a large slice of the web. How many and which sites are built with WordPress? I did some research and here is what I found.
Almost half of the Web is built with WordPress.
The chart below shows the platform used to create the one million most visited sites in the world. The gray bars include sites that do not use a CMS. The green bars include only sites where we can identify the use of a particular CMS
So, while 33.7% of all sites in the world were created without a particular CMS, 43.3% were created with WordPress!
And of those sites that yes were created with a particular CMS, WordPress accounts for an incredible 65.3%. Its closest competitor, Shopify, comes in a distant second place with 4.4%.
What is the difference between WordPress.org and WordPress.com?
It is easy to confuse the open-source platform of WordPress.org with the hosting service of WordPress.com.
WordPress.com offers a rather simplified site creator for creating a website quickly and easily, while WordPress.org is a much more flexible and customizable tool since you can access its code. You can also use all the plugins available in the WordPress library, and you will be free to choose the hosting service you prefer (e.g., Siteground). But all this assumes a longer learning process.
WordPress.com is a product of the company Automattic Inc. which also contributes to the WordPress open-source project.
Big companies and big bloggers use WordPress.com
There are two pricing options for WordPress.com: a Free package with limited functionality (compared to other free site creators), and the Pro package that gives you access to premium themes and most plugins, priced at $15. There is also WordPress VIP i.e., an enterprise-level hosting service.
CNN, Spotify, People, TIME, Microsoft, and The Rolling Stones are some of its most famous clients. In 2010, Microsoft discontinued its Windows Live Spaces blogging service and entered into a partnership with WordPress.com.
WordPress.org continues to grow
In the past 5 years, the use of WordPress has grown from 32.7% of the world’s 10 million most visited sites to 42.9%, outpacing all of its competitors in growth.
The flexibility large companies have to host and edit a WordPress site themselves, or use WordPress.com’s VIP service makes it by far the largest CMS on the web, still growing.
For all aspiring bloggers, the fact that it is free means they will only need an inexpensive WordPress hosting service to get started! And there is a wealth of materials and documentation that will help you learn a little faster.
The following chart shows how WordPress’s market share has grown compared to other platforms.
This table shows how open source competitors Joomla, Drupal and Prestashop are losing market share to WordPress. Not only that, WordPress is the only open source system with a large market share that continues to grow. Shopify and Wix are also growing, however these platforms have their own hosting and are not open source.
So which is bigger, Wix.com or WordPress?
It depends on which WordPress we are talking about. Of all the site creators, Wix’s market share (text in English) is the largest including hosting. According to builtwith.com, 0.55 percent of the world’s one million most visited sites were created with Wix.com.
While WordPress is the platform used by an incredible 36.45% of those sites.
However, this is not a comparable term since the WordPress numbers include all sites with hosting included, in addition to WordPress.com.
The exact market share is difficult to determine but WordPress.com published that “More than 409 million people view more than 20 billion pages each month” on WordPress.com, not very useful information. In September 2020 Wix stated that 180 million websites have been created so far with its platform.
If we take a look at Ahrefs to get a better idea, we can see that, surprisingly, searches for Wix amount to 6.8 million while WordPress appears in searches 5.8 million times. However, we must consider that Wix focuses heavily on marketing and advertising.
This gives us an idea of the interests of these two companies and their market shares.
Will WordPress continue to dominate the CMS market?
All of this information suggests that WordPress will continue to grow. It is a fast, well-supported, open source product that has been able to promptly correct problems and bugs over the years, and it does not seem to be changing course. The arrival of WooCommerce (acquired by Automattic in 2015) has helped WordPress remain competitive and current in the e-commerce arena.
In addition, its hosting service, WordPress.com, is hot on the heels of Wix.com so we are going to see some good things in the coming years. Is it possible that at some point WordPress.com will usurp Wix.com for the top spot on the podium of most popular site creators? Time will tell, but I’m sure the open source architecture of WordPress is here to stay.
