For those of you who are not familiar with WordPress yet – it’s a powerful, open source website builder used by millions of web enthusiasts, entrepreneurs, businesses, corporate sites, news sites and many more.
Over the last 18 years it transformed from a blogging platform into a fully featured site builder. It’s constantly evolving and offering new features and ways to create and customize your website.
I have been using WordPress since its early days (since around 2007-2008). Back then, it was a pretty simple CMS (content management system), mainly used to power blogs and informative websites.
It’s still one of my preferred platforms for building sites, even if there are so many other builders out there, bundled with all-in-one solutions and features.
I like WordPress because:
- It’s free
- It’s open source
- It’s SEO friendly
- The design can be customized as you wish (themes)
- The functionality can be easily extended (plugins)
- It has a great community
Anyway, if you’re considering building a site, WordPress is probably the way to go. It has a steeper learning curve, but once you nail it, you’ll be able to manage pretty much every aspect of your site.
I’ve compiled a list of amazing facts and stats about WordPress, just to illustrate how cool it is and what an impressive history it has.
20 incredible stats and facts about WordPress
How many websites are powered by WordPress?
4. It’s used by more than 364K of top 1 Million sites in the world
What is the company behind WordPress.com and WordPress.org?
Automattic is the company that runs WordPress.com (hosted platform) and contributes to the open source project WordPress.org. Also, hundreds of other volunteers contribute to WordPress.org platform and make it better every day.
5. Automattic has 1,923 employees from 96 countries speaking 120 different languages
What is the most popular version of WordPress?
6. Most popular version: 5.9 (used on 43% of websites)
What is the most popular language of WordPress?
7. Most popular language: English (used by cca. 44% of websites)
How many times WordPress has been downloaded?
9. WordPress 5.9 has been downloaded more than 42 Million times
How many free themes are available in WordPress?
10. There are more than 9,300 free themes available
How many free plugins are available in WordPress?
11. There are more than 59,500 free plugins available
What are the most popular free WordPress themes?
12. The most popular themes (1+ Mln installations): Twenty Twenty, Twenty Seventeen, Astra
What are the most popular free WordPress plugins?
13. The most popular plugins (5+ Mln installations): Contact Form 7, Yoast SEO, Classic Editor, Akismet Spam Protection, Elementor, WooCommerce, Jetpack, Really Simple SSL
How many WordCamps have been organized to date?
WordCamps are locally-organized conferences which are exclusively related to WordPress.
14. More than 1,100 WordCamps organized to date
How many spam comments have been blocked in WordPress to date?
15. More than 527+ Billion spam comments blocked to date
How many times / month is the word “WordPress” searched in Google?
16. More than 4.9 Million searches / month in Google search
What popular brands use WordPress to power their sites?
17. Popular brands using WordPress: Vogue, Quartz, Toyota Motors, New York Post, Time, Sony Music, The Walt Disney Company, etc.
Why every major WordPress release is nicknamed?
WordPress core developers share a love of jazz music, so they name every major release.
18. Every major release is named in honor of a jazz musician
How much do freelance WordPress developers earn?
19. Freelance WordPress developer average rate per hour: $25 – $95
What is the latest version of WordPress
20. The latest version of WordPress is 5.9.1, released in February 2022
Latest major releases and important features:
- WordPress 5.0, Dec 2018: Gutenberg block-based editor launched, new default theme Twenty Nineteen, Classic Editor plugin released
- WordPress 5.1, Feb 2019: introduced Site Health features, Gutenberg performance improvements
- WordPress 5.2, May 2019: PHP error protection, plugin compatibility checks, accessibility updates
- WordPress 5.3, Nov 2019: Gutenberg improvements, new default theme Twenty Twenty, admin email verification, automatic image rotation
- WordPress 5.4, Mar 2020: new blocks, privacy changes, UI/UX changes
- WordPress 5.5, Aug 2020: lazy loading implementation, built-in XML sitemap, auto-updates for plugins and themes, block patterns, new block directory
- WordPress 5.6, Dec 2020: new theme Twenty Twenty-One, better video captioning, more block patterns, auto-update settings, PHP 8.0 support, updates to jQuery
- WordPress 5.7, Mar 2021: easy switch from HTTP to HTTPS, new robots API, integrated lazy load for iframes, Gutenberg editor enhancements
- WordPress 5.8, July 2021: blocks in widgets query loop block for displaying posts, theme.json for global styles and settings, support for webp images
- WordPress 5.9, January 2022: full site editing, Twenty Twenty-Two theme, block themes, site editor, navigation block, pattern directory, theme.json for child themes
Have you heard about WordPress before? Did you like this resource? Share your thoughts in the comments below and feel free to spread the word about this amazing article.
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