WordPress (wordpress.org) was launched in 2003 and quickly became successful due to its ease of use, free plugins and themes, and user-friendly API. This is not to be confused with WordPress.com, which is a different organisation. However, in this article, we’ll discuss both. So, if you’re looking for WordPress numbers, you might be a WordPress site owner, a marketer, a WordPress developer, or just a WordPress fan who wants to learn more about the platform. We have the WordPress statistics you’re looking for, no matter what your justification is.

In this post, we’ll go through 20 of the most interesting WordPress statistics that will help you learn more about WordPress, its components, and security concerns. Both WordPress.org and WordPress.com figures are included. So, let’s have a look at the WordPress statistics.

You Should Know These 20 WordPress Stats for Your Business

WordPress Statistics: A Comprehensive Overview of the Platform

Let’s begin by looking at the big picture. The following WordPress statistics reflect WordPress’s global effect on the internet:

1) WordPress Rules the CMS Market With 47% Share

Let’s start with the overall CMS marketshare to begin our list of WordPress statistics. According to data from BuiltWith, WordPress is used by 47 percent of all websites that use a content management system (CMS). This means that WordPress is used by almost one out of every two websites. They can be hosted on WordPress.com or downloaded as a WordPress.org installation. Furthermore, WordPress is used by 366,280 (or 36.63 percent) of the top one million most visited websites.

2) 20 Billion Pages With 409 Million Page Views Each Month

WordPress-powered websites are visited by 409 million people per month. What’s more incredible is that they’re looking at over 20 billion pages!

3) 70 Million New Posts And 77 Million New Comments Each Month

WordPress is rising at a breakneck pace with no signs of slowing down. WordPress users generate 70 million new posts per month, and readers post 77 million new comments during that time period, according to the website. WordPress is well-known for its ease of use, which appeals to both publishers and readers. That’s why it’s always expanding and has a strong engagement rate.

4) WordPress 5.4 Got Downloaded 27+ Million Times

In March of 2020, WordPress 5.4 was released. It was downloaded 27,501,540 times in just two months! This is as of the day I’m writing this post, so by the time you read it, that number would have risen dramatically. Check out the WordPress.org download live tracker to see what the new number is.

Note: This is simply the download number for the most recent edition of WordPress 5.4. The number of downloads for the previous 37 versions is not included.

5) 38.19% Of the 10,000 Most Visited Websites Are Using WordPress

Many people believe WordPress is just for bloggers, personal blogs, and small businesses. But that’s just half the storey. WordPress is also well-known for hosting well-known and often visited websites. WordPress is used by 3,819 of the top 10,000 most visited websites, according to BuiltWith. WordPress is now used by 36.36 percent of the top 100,000 websites.

So, what are some of the most well-known WordPress sites? To find your answer, look through the list below. (Note: Some of these sites are completely hosted and built on WordPress.com, while others use WordPress.org to power some sections of their sites, such as blogs.)

  • TechCrunch
  • BBC America
  • TED
  • Chegg
  • Canva
  • Facebook Newsroom
  • White House website
  • CNN

6) 2.74 Million Monthly Search Volume For “WordPress” Term

Here are some interesting WordPress stats: According to Google Ads’ Keyword Planner tool, the term “WordPress” has been searched for an average of 2,740,000 times every month in 2019. So we took the average monthly search volume and multiplied it by 12 to get an annual estimate of searches for that name (months). As a result, we can estimate that the term WordPress was searched 32.88 million times in 2019.

7) WordPress.com and WordPress.org Support 120 And 200 Languages Respectively

Localization is one of the primary factors for WordPress’s worldwide success. Not everybody in the world speaks English, and you won’t be able to succeed on a global scale unless you do anything to bridge the language gap between you and your customers. Now, let’s look at the WordPress statistics for each individual site:

WordPress.com claims that blogs can be published in 120 different languages. The three most commonly used languages are as follows.

  1. English: 71%
  1. Spanish: 4.7%
  1. Indonesian: 2.4%

WordPress.org: Pages created with WordPress.org can be written in 200 languages and translated. WordPress heart, as well as plugins and themes, can all be translated into different languages.

WordPress.org has a whole team of translators called Polyglots who focus on languages so that people can do it in their native tongue.

WordPress Statistics: Plugins

Plugins are pieces of software that can be used to enhance the functionality and features of your WordPress site. They’re written in the PHP programming language. Here are some of the most important WordPress statistics for plugins:

8) WordPress.org Features 56,000+ Plugins

Here’s another one of those amusing WordPress stats. Users can select from 56,364 plugins in the WordPress.org plugin directory. Some plugins are completely free, while others provide a basic free version with a few paid features that users must pay for.

9) Seven Plugins Have 5+ Million Active Installations Each

Some plugins have a larger following than others. According to WordPress.org, each of the top seven plugins has over 5,000,000 active installations. The following is a list:

10) The Yoast SEO Plugin Has Been Downloaded 211+ Million Times

A plugin’s active instals and cumulative downloads are two separate items. People may download the necessary plugins but not activate them right away, or they may choose to activate them only when they are needed. The total number of downloads should also be considered when determining a plugin’s popularity.

Yoast SEO has been downloaded 211,126,597 times, according to WPsocket data, making it the most popular plugin. The following are some of the most common plugins.

11) 27% Of Top 1 Million Ecommerce Sites Use WooCommerce Checkout

Without referencing WooCommerce, no list of WordPress statistics will be complete. WooCommerce is a popular WordPress plugin that allows you to build shopping carts. WooCommerce is the most popular ecommerce platform, with WooCommerce checkout being used by 27% of the top million most visited websites.

This plugin has been downloaded 80,781,569 times and is used by over 5 million people. A total of 355,629 websites with active WooCommerce installations are currently available on the market.

Statistics on WordPress: It’s All About the Money

When it comes to company, it’s generally all about the money. This is true in terms of both the costs and the wages that people would expect to receive in their chosen fields. So, without mentioning this type of information, our list of WordPress stats will be incomplete.

12) WordPress’s Estimated Cost Is $21+ Million

According to Open Hub, WordPress has 1,375,951 lines of code, which would take 382 “person-years” to create. If a WordPress developer’s annual salary is $55,000, a project of this size would need $21,036,446 in funding.

13) U.S. WordPress Developers’ Salaries Average $73K A Year

According to Neuvoo, a WordPress developer’s salary in the United States varies from $36,436 to $124,313, with an average of $73,125 per year. According to Zip Recruiter, the average salary for a WordPress designer in the United States is $55,013/year.

People usually employ WordPress freelancers for small WordPress projects. Envato is a good place to look for small WP project prices.

Statistics on WordPress: Intellectual Property Issues

14) WordPress Received 75k+ Copyright Notices From DMCA

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act received 75,837 complaints about copyright from January 1, 2014, to December 31, 2019. (DMCA). WordPress.com has deleted 33% of at least some of the contested material since reviewing the situation.

15) WordPress Denied 85% Of Trademark Infringement Allegations

WordPress received 2,944 trademark complaints from January 1, 2014, to December 31, 2019. Just 15% of all or partial content concerning the contested materials was deleted after the team carefully reviewed each complaint for accuracy and validity.

WordPress Statistics: WordPress Security Issues

WordPress has thousands of plugins and themes, and it is used by many people with little or no technical experience. As a result, it’s no surprise that cybercriminals are interested in it. (For more information, see Why Hackers Attack Websites.) Here are a few interesting WordPress security stats:

16) Akismet Blocked 497 Billion Spam Comments

Akismet is a WordPress plugin that protects your blog’s comment section by automatically filtering spam and bots. It has blocked 497,103,514,116 spam comments up until now (“now” being when I wrote this article).

Over the last 30 days (as of May 2020 data), another WordPress protection provider, Wordfence, has blocked a total of 5,350,193,633 cyber attacks and blacklisted 136,064 malicious IPs.

17) Top 3 Most Vulnerable Plugins, Themes, and WP Core Versions

WPvulndb has compiled a list of the most insecure WordPress versions, plugins, and themes from a sample of 420 WordPress versions, 2,282 plugins, and 328 themes. The following are the three most vulnerable plugins and themes (at the time of writing):

18) 41.47% of Vulnerabilities on WordPress Sites Are XSS Injection Related

Cross-site scripting (XSS) is a type of injection attack in which the attacker injects malicious JavaScript into the input fields and forms of a legitimate website. When a user clicks on one of these links, they become victims of a variety of cybercrime. It’s the most popular method for attracting tourists to WordPress pages. WPvulndb looked at 3,990 different vulnerabilities. There were 1,654 (or 41.45%) XSS vulnerabilities among them.

SQL injections (13 percent) and multi-party attacks were also among the top vulnerabilities (7.78 percent ).

19) 41% Of WordPress Sites Get Hacked Due to Vulnerabilities in Hosting Site

We know which techniques are used by attackers, such as XSS, SQLI, and MULTI. But then there’s the issue of which sections of WordPress are particularly vulnerable to such attacks. Hosting platform vulnerabilities are the most abused in 41 percent of hacking cases, according to an infographic posted by WP WhiteSecurity. Furthermore, insecure themes were used in 29% of the hackings, and security issues in plugins were responsible for 22% of the hackings. Tip: Vulnerability testing will assist you in identifying and resolving problems before they are discovered by hackers!

20) 90% Of Clean-Up Requests Were from WordPress Sites

Let’s look at recorded clean up requests to round out our list of WordPress stats. Sucuri data reveals that websites using the WordPress CMS accounted for 90% of their overall clean-up requests. 36.7 percent of the websites demanding clean ups were using obsolete versions of WordPress, according to their data.

Major Takeaways from Our List of WordPress Stats

  • To protect your users’ data in transit through a secure encrypted channel, always use SSL/TLS certificates on your WordPress site. These certificates are not only cheap, but they are also simple to instal using the Very Simple SSL plugin.
  • As soon as new versions of WordPress, themes, and plugins become available, update them. To hack your websites, attackers can use any bugs they can find in older versions of these tools.
  • Free backup plugins can never be relied upon. Instead, use software like CodeGuard, which checks your backups, eliminates malware, and then stores your data on Amazon Web Services’ AWS cloud platform.
  • To secure your website from brute force attacks, use plugins like Loginizer, Limit Login Attempts, WPS Limit Login, and others.
  • Using plugins including WordPress 2-Step Verification, Unloq Two Factor Authentication, and others, allow two-factor or multi-factor authentication.
  • To protect the admin panel and prevent unauthorised access to critical admin authorizations, use unique and protected passwords.

Conclusion

For a long time, WordPress would undoubtedly remain the CMS market leader. If you have or intend to have a WordPress site, be careful about its stability. It’s true that using ready-made free plugins and themes will save you thousands of dollars. However, you must also invest time and money in securing your WordPress account.

Some tricks are free, such as software updates and the installation of free security plugins like Akismet. Others would necessitate the purchase of security software such as an SSL/TLS certificate, firewalls, malware scanners, backup tools such as CodeGuard, and so on.

Whatever tool you use, we hope you find these WordPress statistics fascinating and useful in learning more about WordPress.