While tweeting the other morning, I noticed a tweet from Matt Mullenweg, creator of WordPress, highlighting that WordPress now owns 25% of the website market share.
One can assume that the title, ‘Seventy-Five to Go’ is a tongue-in-cheek poke at Matt’s intention to have 100% of websites built on WordPress. (We all know that I am doing my part.) Matt referenced the published survey results reported on the W3Techs website.
As this WP Tavern article points out, WordPress likely has an even greater share since the websites surveyed by W3Techs are in Alexa’s top 10 million most popular websites. Websites not making the top 10 million most popular are not included, nor are the WordPress websites built on WordPress.COM that do not use their own domain name nor entice enough traffic to put them in Alexa’s top 10 million.
The survey also shows that WordPress is still the fastest growing CMS, “Every 74 seconds a site within the top 10 million starts using WordPress. Compare this with Shopify, the second-fastest growing CMS, which is gaining a new site every 22 minutes,” Gelbmann says. — Jeff Chandler, WP Tavern
So, WordPress is the fastest growing CMS…but we knew that. Still, I am feeling very gratified. Back in 2005, I started working with blogging software called ‘b2’. WordPress was created from a fork of ‘b2’, and eventually replaced b2.
Initially, the development task was to add a blog to existing websites. Over time, the development task morphed into developing full websites using the WordPress software. In that scenario, clients had the opportunity to update content on the pages as well as the posts. This is the practice I use today. Develop on WordPress unless there is a good reason not to. [And there are websites that don’t need WordPress.] Some clients maintain their own content and some send updates to me.
I am happy that I have positioned my clients for success. They are able to maintain their own websites (if they so choose). Their websites are on a tool that has
- great visibility,
- a plan for the future,
- thousands who write code for it,
- thousands of choices for add-on functionality (via plugins and widgets),
- a loyal user base,
and, that can be hosted with almost any hosting company (Linux and IIS), and that is being included in curriculum in many academic environments.
Full Articles:
- A Quarter of the Top 10 Million Sites Ranked by Alexa Use WordPress, Jeff Chandler, WP Tavern
- Content Management Systems, W3Techs.com