According to reports, 43.3% of the websites built with WordPress. If we look at websites created with CMSs, that number is even higher: 65.3% of websites built with an identifiable content management system are currently using WordPress!
That’s right! Everyone from small bloggers to huge country-sized corporations uses WordPress to manage their content.
Since its founding in 2003, WordPress has grown from a blogging tool to a full-on CMS that powers large swaths of the Internet. So exactly how many and which sites are built?
I’ve sifted through the data, and here’s what I’ve found…
- Nearly half of the Web is built on WordPress
The chart below shows which platform was used to build the top million most visited websites globally. The grey bars include websites that don’t use a CMS. The green bars only include websites where we can identify a CMS.
So, while 33.7% of the world’s websites were created without an identifiable CMS, 43.3% of all the world’s websites were created with WordPres!
And of the world’s websites created with an identifiable CMS, WordPress accounted for a whopping 65.3% of them. Their nearest competitor Shopify is still a distant second, powering only 4.4% of the sites sampled.
What’s the difference between WordPress.org and WordPress.com?
It’s easy to confuse the open-source platform of WordPress.org with the hosting service of WordPress.com.
WordPress.com is just one of many web hosting services that support the WordPres platform.
which also contributes to the open-source project. WordPress.com offers a somewhat simplified website builder to help create websites more easily.
WordPress.org is the actual platform for creating websites. It’s very customizable as you can access all of its code. You can also use any plugin in the repository and are free to choose any web hosting company you can afford. But all that comes with a steeper learning curve.
- Big companies and bloggers alike use WordPress.com
Many WordPress.com pricing options range from a freemium plan with limited features (compared to other free website builders) to small business e-commerce plans to their VIP service, which is a hosting service at an enterprise scale.
CNN, Spotify, People, TIME, Microsoft, and The Rolling Stones are some of their most notable clients. In 2010 Microsoft shut down their Windows Live Spaces blogging service and began a partnership with WordPress.com.
- org continues to grow in popularity.
In the past five years
it has grown from being used by 32.7% of the top 10 million most visited websites globally to being used by 43.3%, outpacing the growth of all of its competitors.
The flexibility of large companies to either self-host a modified site or use the enterprise services of WordPress.com make it far and away from the largest CMS on the Internet, and it continues to keep growing.
For aspiring bloggers, the fact that it’s free means that all they need is a cheap hosting provider, and they’re good to go! And there is a vast online knowledge base that makes climbing the steeper learning curve a little easier.
So, who’s bigger, Wix.com or WordPres?
Well, it depends on which WordPres you’re talking about. Among all the available website builders, Wix’s market share is the largest of all the hosted website builders.
According to builtwith.com, 0.55% of the top 1 million websites are built with Wix.com.
On the other hand, it is the platform for a whopping 36.45% of those sites. This is not a one-to-one comparison, though, as these numbers include all self-hosted sites beyond WordPress.com.
Exact market share numbers are hard to come by, but WordPress.com does publish that “Over 409 million people view more than 20 billion pages each month” on WordPress.com, which isn’t really all that helpful. Wix claims that 180 million websites have been created on their platform until September 2020.
we can see that, surprisingly, people searched for Wix 6.8M times versus WordPres,
which was searched 5.8M times.
However, you have to take into account that Wix is a publicly-traded company, and a fair share of the interest in Wix could be from shareholders.
This can give us a glimpse into the interest in these two companies and perhaps a little insight into their comparative sizes.
Will WordPress continue to be the dominant CMS on the internet?
The signs look good that will continue to grow. As a nimble, well-supported open-source product, they have quickly addressed bugs and security issues over the years, and that doesn’t look to change.
The introduction of WooCommerce (acquired by Automattic in 2015) has helped stay competitive and relevant in the e-commerce area. Very competitive, in fact, as WooCommerce’s market share is impressive too.
Additionally, its affiliated hosting service, WordPress.com, is nipping at the heels of Wix.com, which should make for an interesting competition in the years to come.
Will WordPress.com finally unseat Wix.com as the most popular web host? Time will tell, but it is a good bet that open-source architecture is here to stay!
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