WordPress popularity

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How WordPress became the #1 CMS

Marc Korthout

WordPress is the most used Content Management System (CMS). Many people will claim this statement, but what is the deal? Is it true and what about the other players? Is WordPress’ popularity rightful?

WordPress history

In 2001 Michel Valdrighi published a small application with it’s main purpose of starting a weblog. He called it B2, Michel quickly parked the application, it didn’t even manage to celebrate it’s one year anniversary.

Until 2003, that is when Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little used the B2 software as a base to build the most populair CMS suite to date. It all went very well and it was clear that WordPress had a bright future, Vladrighi also joined the team which was expanding rapidly. The first public release of WordPress was in may 2003 and Worpress popularity became an increasing item.

WordPress popularity at this moment

Currently 100.000(!) new WordPress websites are made each day. That’s an incredible amount if you ask me, because of the big BIG user-base there is also a lot information to find about WordPress and almost every plugin you can dream of can be found in the WordPress repository.

As you can see in the infographic underneath, WordPress has only been winning marketshare since 2011.

WordPress popularity is still increasing and it’s in use on 39,5% of all websites on the internet.

WordPress plugins

Currently there are over 55.000 plugins in the WordPress repository. Each of these plugins extend the WordPress functionality in their own way, a lot of these plugins are free a whole other lot are paid plugins.

Our top 5 favourite plugins

ManageWP Orion
Manage multiple WordPress website installations for free with this one of a kind plugin. You need to sign-up for an account, but it’s completely free. Extra services on demand can be paid seperately.
Rank Math
With Rank Math (or Rank Math Pro) you can easily optimize your WordPress website for the Search Engines. Edit your SERP snippets and keywords becomes a breeze with the help of this plugin.
Internal Link Juicer
Making a website rank higher on Google begins with the internal link structure of your own website. With the help of Internal Link Juicer you can set keywords for each page you publish, when there is another page which contains one of those keywords in it’s content it will automatically link to the page you set for that specific keyword.
reSmush.it
Make your website faster using this plugin. It will magically “smush” or should I say compress 🙂 all the existing images on your website. And it will function as an image compressor for new uploads.
White Label CMS
If you are running an agency this plugin will definitely become handy for you. Customize the looks of the WordPress backend to give it you own unique branding.

Probably because of such a BIG offer of plugins, WordPress became the #1 used CMS! It is still growing and knocks out all the other CMS programs with it’s flexibility, functionality and availability!

WordPress facts

39,5% off all websites on the internet are powered by WordPress.
Not only personal websites and companies run on the WordPress engine, also government websites use the WordPress software. (Websitebuilder)
It is possible to use the WordPress interface in 68 + languages. (WPBeginner)
WordPress.com support receives more than 20,000 support tickets each months. (WordPress.com)
WordPress is older than Facebook and Twitter.
Off all hacked WordPress websites 39% were in need of updates. (WPBeginner)
Elementor is the platform’s most popular page builder. (SoftwareFindr)
Every year a new official wordpress theme is released.
Approximately 8% of all hacked WordPress websites were hacked because of a weak password. (WPBeginner.com)
WordPress’s logo was designed by Jason Santa Maria in 2005. (WordPress.com)

It is difficult to say what the future will bring for our beloved WordPress software, but we expect the yellow line in our infographic to rise above the 50% very steadily!

We’ll keep on using it anyway 🙂