By SCS Marketing & PR Team
WORDPRESS and its content management systems (CMS) power nearly half of all websites on the internet.
According to data from tech data survey site, W3Techs, there are 810 million websites that use WP – which is 43 per cent of all websites online compared to 4.1 per cent on Shopify, 2.3 per cent on Wix and just two per cent on Squarespace. This provides WordPress with a 64.2 per cent share of the CMS market and ten times greater than its nearest competitor, Shopify on 6.2 per cent.
Statista reports that there were 1.88 billion websites online in 2022 and it estimates that more than 500 WordPress sites are built every day.
More than a fifth (20.2 per cent) of WP sites use WooCommerce (8.7 per cent of all websites) which means there are 163.5m WooCommerce stores. WooCommerce is an open-source e-commerce plugin for WordPress and is designed for small to large-sized online merchant businesses.
WooCommerce, built in WP, is the world’s most popular e-commerce platform with 36.7 per cent of the market share followed by Squarespace (14.5 per cent), Woo Themes (14.4 per cent), Shopify (10 per cent) and WixStores (6.4 per cent)
There are more than 20,000 WordPress themes – 10,000 of which are free – while 54.3 per cent of WP users are running the latest version of WP which is WordPress 6.0. Divi is the most popular WP theme with 3.8million themes. There are also 60,000 free WP plug-ins on the WP plugin database – Contact Form 7 is the most widely used free one with more than five million installations, followed by Yoast SEO and Elementor Website Builder.
The below figures are an estimation calculated based on each CMS platform’s market share and the estimated number of websites online.
CMS Websites (% of total) Websites (number)*
WordPress 43% 810 million
Shopify 4.1% 70 million
Wix 2.3% 43 million
Squarespace 2% 38 million
Joomla 1.6% 30 million
WordPress has been the fastest growing CMS over the last 10 years and the percentage of sites using WP grew from three per cent between 2021 to 2023 alone.
WP releases around two to three updates every year – the last one was 6.1 in November 2022 – while around 70 million (71 per cent written in English) new blog posts are published every month. That is around 1,600 new blog post every minute, while 77 million comments are published every month.
