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On the trend of "Ten Years After" that seems to have infected everything and everyone, let's see what these last 10 years have been for WordPress between ups and downs but above all ups.
WordPress is an open source "blog" and content management system (CMS) software platform or a program that, running on the server side, allows the creation and distribution of an Internet site made up of textual or multimedia content, easily manageable and dynamically updated . It was initially created by Matt Mullenweg and distributed under the GNU General Public License. It is developed in PHP with support for the MySQL database manager.
The first version of WordPress was released on May 27, 2003, by founders Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little as a fork of b2/cafelog. The name WordPress was suggested by Christine Selleck.
Since then too much water has passed under the bridges and that small project has come a long way.
WordPress remains the most popular content management system in the world.
WordPress dominates other markets as well, such as eCommerce, so it's definitely not a blog-only CMS.
And to show you where these conclusions came from, we have compiled some mind-boggling statistics on WordPress market share, as well as the market share of two of the most popular eCommerce plugins for WordPress WooCommerce and Easy Digital Downloads.
WordPress dominates 32% of all websites
WordPress powers 32,0% of all websites on the Internet , including those without a content management system (CMS) or with a custom-coded CMS. And if you limit the dataset to only websites with a well-known CMS, WordPress's market share becomes even more dominant.
In that case, WordPress holds a 59,5% market share for content management systems on websites with a well-known CMS. How does this compare to the market share of other popular content management systems? Let's take a look:
While there are tools for building hosted websites like Squarespace and Wix, the numbers show that WordPress is in no danger of being dethroned anytime soon! And WordPress also holds a dominant position on Joomla and Drupal, two other popular CMS content management systems.
Is WordPress only used by many small sites?
No! To dig deeper into the WordPress market share breakdown, we turned to BuiltWith . BuiltWith lets you see the market share for websites that meet specific criteria, such as being on Quantcast's Top 10 page (a list that attempts to compile the 10.000 most trafficked websites on the Internet).
Here's what WordPress' market percentages look like when you segment the
- Top 10k Quantcast Sites - WordPress holds a market share of 35,04%
- Top 100k Quantcast Sites - WordPress holds a market share of 33,83%
While there is a slight decline in WordPress's overall market share of 32,0%, WordPress is still nearly as popular among high-traffic websites.
Among the most important and consolidated international realities and brands we find, for example: New York Observer, New York Post, TED, Thought Catalog, Williams, USA Today, CNN, Fortune.com, TIME.com, National Post, Spotify, TechCrunch, CBS Local, NBC , and many others.
Is WordPress market share still growing?
Yup! The market share of WordPress is not just "ever-growing", but in reality it has been growing steadily at roughly the same pace all the time that we have the data. So how fast is WordPress growing? Let's start with last year's numbers.
At the beginning of 2017, WordPress hosted 27,3% of all websites. By October 2018, WordPress had reached its current market share of 32,0% . Some quick calculations should tell you that WordPress has gained an additional 4,7% of the total website market – good for growth of ~17,2%.
How does it compare to previous years? Here's WordPress's overall market share as of 2011 , according to W3Techs:
As you can see, WordPress has steadily increased its market share by about 2-4% (in terms of overall market share) over the past 7 years. And it shows no signs of slowing down. If this trend continues, it won't be long before WordPress powers a third of all websites on the internet.
As of October 2018, the WordPress core had 38.515 commits, 322 releases, and has 46 contributors from around the world.
How does the growth of WordPress compare to other content management systems?
So WordPress is growing… but is it growing faster than the competition? That's a more complicated question to answer. As far as standalone CMS systems go, WordPress is still the growth leader.
From 2017 to 2018:
- Joomla's market share actually dropped from 3,4% to 3,1%
- Drupal's market share decreased from 2,2% to 2,0%
In terms of year-over-year growth, this means:
- Joomla shrank by 8,9%
- Drupal reduced by 4,5%
While those numbers aren't keeping up with WordPress, things are a bit different with hosted website providers.
While tools like Squarespace and Wix still represent a small percentage of the overall market, they are experiencing rapid growth compared to standalone content management systems.
From 2017 to 2018:
- Squarespace market share increased from 0,5% to 1,4%
- Wix's market share increased from 0,3% to 1,0%
In terms of year-over-year growth, this means:
- Squarespace grew 180%
- Wix grew by 233%
So while WordPress is still the dominant player, hosted website providers are growing at a faster rate. You can also see these growth trends playing on their own in Google Trends, where Joomla and Drupal (and to a lesser extent, WordPress) have either fallen or remained unchanged, while Squarespace and Wix are generating growing interest:
And on the ecommerce front? WordPress or WooCommerce how are you doing?
It should be emphasized without too many frills that in terms of performance WooCommerce is still natively not competitive with other market leaders, first of all Magento or Prestashop. However, it must be said that except in special cases in which Magento may be the only attractive solution for the size of the project or features such as the multistore for example, WooCommerce together with Prestashop can be excellent and very low-cost solutions for medium-small projects, where we necessarily want to contain the budget.
Let's be clear: it's unlikely a multinational company can implement a project with a million items, thousands of visitors per minute from all over the world, with a system that connects to a warehouse management system, an ERP, using WooCommerce . In these cases, you turn to Magento and do it without a second thought, because that's the ideal tool. But forget about going into production with a budget of 10 euros. Add at least one zero.
WooCommerce , however, dominated 2018 with a 21% global market share according to BuiltWith. I believe this is primarily due to the fact that it's a simple, free plugin for WordPress, the most popular CMS in today's digital world. WooCommerce allows you to effectively scale your ecommerce store with little to no hassle.
In short words
Unlike 2017, we have noticed that ecommerce entrepreneurs are shifting to platforms that offer easy-to-use interfaces like Shopify and Wix Stores, instead of specific customization that brings more functionality to their ecommerce stores.
In our opinion, the best open-source e-commerce platforms of 2018 are WooCommerce and Magento, as they allow you to scale your e-commerce store unlike any other platform. You have complete control over your online store. From improved resource management with caching to upgrading your e-commerce web hosting plan to more powerful servers, you can enjoy your e-commerce experience.
Despite the control offered by WooCommerce or Magento, some e-commerce store owners simply prefer a hassle-free solution like Shopify or Wix. It really depends on your skills and personal preferences.
