In May, WordPress celebrated its 10th birthday. The platform has grown from its humble beginnings as a new open-source project to the most widely-used content management system on the internet, making up nearly 20% of all websites on the web.
As you’d expect with such a ubiquitous platform, the people and organizations who make up the the WordPress ecosystem come from a diversity of backgrounds and specialties, including everyone from designers, developers, bloggers, entrepreneurs, to enterprises. Industry-leading companies like the BBC, TechCrunch, and AdAge trust WordPress for their online presence.
Since we get to see a lot of different use cases at WP Engine, we did a bit of research into the adoption and proliferation of WordPress across the internet. The results came in, and WordPress surpassed even our expectations. Below is the infographic we compiled with the data.
Check it out!
Neat data. I run six sites, so I’m more than doing my share. WPE makes that über-easy.
Brilliant – mind if I embed/share it on our site (credited to WPengine of course)?
Certainly! Feel free to embed and share.
How’s that: http://winningwp.com/wordpress-statistics-wpengine-new-year-deal/ (just published!)?
You didn’t explain what the numbers in the age breakdown chart mean. Number of people using WP? Percentage of that age group knowing about or using WP?
Also, you have a typo in the last sentence, should be world, not word, no?
But interesting info. Thanks.
Andy
Hi Andy! Thanks for your comments. Let me explain those numbers real quick. In that section, those numbers represent the percentage of people in the respective age groups who knew about WordPress.
Not to troll, or to be a skeptic or downer, I love WordPress as much as the next guy and depend on it for a living, but it would seem these stats are a bit misleading when taken into account the survey sample and methods. While the sample may be large enough, I don’t think it’s a representation of the world by any means. So, scaling the results to world population sizes can’t quite be accurate.
Methodology: Conducted by Google Consumer Surveys 7.25.13 – 7.27.13 Sample: USA National Adult Internet Population 1500 responses
Hi Evan, Thank you for your feedback.
For sections “WordPress Internationally” and “How many people own a WordPress site?,” the numbers were pulled from WordPress (http://en.wordpress.com/stats/) on how many WordPress sites are in the world. We compared that number to the population of the world to get the figures in the infographic.
Hi Lane,
great graphic. One question though:
If 7.5% of adults own a WordPress site (third image), that’s 1 site per 13 adults. Now the last image says 1 site per 101 people. That means 88 minors (101 people – 13 adults) per 13 adults (if no minor has a WordPress site, if they do, it’s even more)! But that means 6.7 minors per adult.
Or did I understand something wrong?
Thanks,
Stephan
Hi Stephan,
Thanks for your feedback. 7.5% comes from our survey this year. All results from the survey can be found here (http://www.slideshare.net/photoflame42/wordcamp-chicago). Your question about 7.5% is addressed on slide 7.
If you take the 73,000,000 sites that WordPress states are WordPress and divide by the roughly 7,100,000,000 (http://www.census.gov/popclock/) people in the world you get approximately 1 site for every 101 people.
7.5% of adults own a WordPress site? That’s… just not true. 350million people own a WordPress site?
According to WordPress.com, there are 73million WordPress sites. Somehow I doubt that there are roughly 5 UNIQUE owners of every single WordPress site in the world. I’d wager some very fuzzy math was used to come up with that 350million WordPress owners number.
Also, Spanish has 350million people who speak spanish as their primary language. If you consider secondary language, given the Spanish diaspora, that number is much larger. But regardless, the 350million WordPress site owners seems very wrong.
Hey Mike,
Thanks for the comment about the numbers! The example is intended to compare percentages rather than the population behind the percentage, but I can see where that might have been a bit confusing at first.
We’ve updated the infographic to state 7.5% of US adults own a WordPress site.
Thanks again for the comment!
-Lane