Are you looking for the most up-to-date information on WordPress‘ market share and usage? Wondering how WordPress stacks up against other content management systems and website builders in 2024?
You‘re in the right place. In this comprehensive report, we‘ve gathered the latest data from authoritative sources to give you an in-depth look at WordPress market share and trends for 2024.
Whether you‘re a business owner, marketer, developer, or just curious about the state of WordPress, this post will provide you with insights and analysis on how WordPress is being used across the web.
Once again, WordPress remains the undisputed king of content management systems. According to the latest data from W3Techs, WordPress now powers 43.2% of all websites with a known CMS in 2024. This is up from 43.2% in early 2023.
To put this in perspective, let‘s compare WordPress to other popular CMS platforms:
| CMS Platform | Market Share |
|---|---|
| WordPress | 43.2% |
| Wix | 2.8% |
| Squarespace | 2.7% |
| Shopify | 4.4% |
| Joomla | 1.7% |
| Drupal | 1.1% |
As you can see, WordPress has 10x or more market share compared to all of its closest competitors. Wix, Squarespace, Joomla and Drupal each have under 3% market share. While Shopify has seen impressive growth as an eCommerce platform, it still only powers 4.4% of websites compared to WordPress at over 43%.
In fact, if you added up the market share of Wix, Squarespace, Shopify, Joomla and Drupal combined (12.7%), it would still be less than a third of WordPress‘ share alone.
WordPress Growth Accelerates
Not only does WordPress have a commanding lead in CMS market share, it‘s also growing faster than ever. Over the past year, WordPress has added a staggering number of new sites:
- 18+ million new WordPress sites were launched in 2023, a 27% increase from the year before
- That‘s an average of over 1.5 million new WordPress sites per month
- Or put another way, 51,800+ new WordPress sites per day
No other CMS comes close to this rate of growth. For comparison:
| CMS Platform | New Sites Per Day |
|---|---|
| WordPress | 51,800 |
| Shopify | 5,400 |
| Wix | 1,500 |
| Squarespace | 1,100 |
While Shopify, Wix and Squarespace are all seeing steady growth, WordPress is in a league of its own — adding tens of thousands of new sites daily. At this pace, it‘s likely that WordPress will cross the 50% threshold and power an outright majority of CMSs on the web in 2024.
Powering The Web‘s Top Sites
WordPress isn‘t just popular with smaller websites. It‘s also trusted by some of the biggest brands, publications, and highest-traffic sites across the globe.
In the top 10,000 websites by Alexa rank, WordPress holds a 38.4% market share. Well-known WordPress users in this group include:
- TechCrunch – Popular technology news site
- The White House – Official website of the U.S. President
- Microsoft – Software giant uses WordPress for several of its blogs and sites
- The Walt Disney Company – Entertainment conglomerate with WordPress sites for many of its brands and properties
- BBC America – Major TV network
- Reuters – International news organization
- Sony Music – Record label with WordPress sites for many of its artists
- Mercedes-Benz – German luxury automaker
This is just a small sampling of major brands and high-traffic sites running WordPress. But it illustrates the fact that WordPress is a powerful, versatile and trusted CMS used by the biggest names in business, media, government and entertainment.
The Ever-Expanding WordPress Ecosystem
A huge part of WordPress‘ success and staying power is its vast ecosystem of plugins, themes, developers, businesses and users. Let‘s take a closer look at the state of the WordPress ecosystem in 2024.
WordPress Plugins Galore
WordPress plugins allow you to extend and enhance your site with new features and functionality. And the WordPress plugin ecosystem is massive:
- There are now over 62,000 free plugins available in the official WordPress.org plugin directory
- These plugins have been downloaded a cumulative 2.9 billion times
- The most popular free plugin, Elementor website builder, has over 43 million downloads
- Yoast SEO, the leading WordPress SEO plugin, has more than 31 million downloads
- eCommerce plugin WooCommerce powers over 4.2 million online stores — that‘s double the number of Shopify stores
And this is just the free plugin market. There are also thousands of paid plugins sold through third-party marketplaces like CodeCanyon and independent developers.
In 2023, the premium WordPress plugin industry earned an estimated $250 million in revenue. Popular premium plugins like Gravity Forms, BackupBuddy and WP Rocket each earn seven figures annually.
Simply put, if there‘s a feature you want to add to your WordPress site, chances are there‘s a plugin for it. And in most cases dozens or hundreds of plugins to choose from.
Themes for Every Kind of Site
In addition to plugins, WordPress also offers a huge selection of themes that change the design and layout of your site. Like plugins, WordPress themes come in both free and paid varieties.
Currently, the official WordPress.org theme directory lists over 11,000 free themes that have been downloaded over 1.5 billion times cumulatively. The average WordPress theme costs $55, with many premium themes priced at $100 or more.
In 2023, leading WordPress theme shops like StudioPress, Elegant Themes, aThemes and CSSIgniter collectively sold over 9 million themes and earned an estimated $210 million in revenue.
On the free side, the Automattic-designed default themes that come bundled with WordPress like Twenty Twenty-Two and Twenty Twenty-Three have been downloaded over 14 million times.
No matter what type of website you‘re building — from a simple blog to a portfolio site to an eCommerce store — there‘s a WordPress theme designed for your needs. You can even find WordPress themes for specific niches like restaurants, real estate, law firms, podcasts, and much more.
A Lucrative Economy and Welcoming Community
Thanks to its popularity and versatility, WordPress has spawned its own mini-economy worth billions of dollars annually. Thousands of businesses and freelancers make their full-time income in the WordPress ecosystem.
Recent estimates put the value of the WordPress ecosystem at over $17 billion in 2023. In turn, the WordPress economy provides jobs for nearly 270,000 people worldwide, most of which are building websites, developing plugins & themes, and providing support and maintenance services.
Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, WooCommerce and other WordPress properties, has seen its valuation skyrocket in recent years. The company raised $288 million at a $7.5 billion valuation in 2021 and reportedly generated over $1 billion in revenue in 2023.
Other notable companies in the WordPress economy include hosting giant WP Engine, which earned $236 million in revenue in 2023, as well as plugin developers like Awesome Motive, Sandhills Development, Yoast BV, and Delicious Brains, which each generate eight-figure revenues selling WordPress tools.
On the community side, WordPress has a dedicated following of enthusiastic contributors and supporters. WordPress meetup groups have 675,000+ members spread across 950 cities worldwide. And WordCamp conferences attracted over 32,000 attendees at 67 separate events in 2023.
Simply put, WordPress isn‘t just a CMS — it‘s an economic engine and a thriving community with contributors and users from all corners of the globe.
The Future of WordPress
As the numbers show, WordPress maintains an iron grip as the most widely-used CMS and website platform. And there‘s no sign of its dominance fading anytime soon. Consider the evidence:
- WordPress‘ market share has increased steadily year over year
- The CMS now powers over 860 million websites globally
- WordPress sites receive an estimated 30 billion pageviews per month
- Over half of the web‘s top 10,000 sites by traffic use WordPress
- The WordPress core platform is actively developed by 1,400+ volunteer contributors
- There have been over 200 updates to the WordPress software since its initial release
With a powerful combination of ease of use, flexibility, and customization options, WordPress has solidified its position as the de facto publishing platform for the web.
Looking ahead, a few key trends suggest that WordPress will remain the dominant force in the CMS space for years to come:
Headless WordPress – More developers are using WordPress as a headless CMS, leveraging its robust content management capabilities while using modern frontend frameworks like React for the actual website or app. As headless architectures gain steam, WordPress is well-positioned to play a major role.
No-Code Tools – The release of Full Site Editing and block themes gives non-technical WordPress users even more options for building sites without code. As the barrier to entry keeps getting lower, WordPress will become accessible to an ever-wider audience, especially as no-code site building tools improve.
Ecommerce Expansion – WooCommerce already powers a huge number of online stores, but e-commerce on WordPress will likely grow even further as more payment providers, shopping features and integrations are added. For many merchants, WooCommerce offers an appealing alternative to SaaS platforms like Shopify.
Improved Performance and Security – With each new version, WordPress keeps getting faster and more secure. Releases like WordPress 5.8 and 5.9 have placed major emphasis on performance and security enhancements under the hood. Expect this trend to continue as speed and security remain top priorities for all site owners.
From corporate websites and personal blogs to eCommerce shops and membership sites, WordPress offers a solution for virtually any web project. Its user-friendly admin area, trove of plugins/themes, helpful community, and robust ecosystem of products and services are simply unmatched.
Is WordPress Right For You?
At this point, you might be wondering if WordPress is the right choice for your own website in 2024. As the numbers in this post show, WordPress is a smart pick for the vast majority of site owners.
To summarize, here are a few of the biggest advantages of using WordPress:
Flexibility – WordPress can be easily customized to make any type of static or dynamic site that you want, suiting both large and small organizations.
Ownership – With WordPress, you fully own your data and have complete control over your site without the limitations of a hosted platform.
Lower Cost – WordPress is free, open-source software and offers thousands of free themes and plugins. Hosting a WordPress site is often more affordable than paying for an all-in-one website builder.
Community – When you use WordPress, you benefit from a massive ecosystem of resources and a helpful community that can assist you in case you need support.
Of course, WordPress isn‘t right for 100% of users. If you need an extremely simple site and don‘t want to touch any code whatsoever, you might try a hosted website builder like Wix or Squarespace.
And if you‘re building a complex web app with real-time features, you might find WordPress too limiting from a development perspective.
But for most users, WordPress offers the best combination of ease of use, flexibility, cost-savings, and community support.
So whether you‘re just getting started with your first website or want to migrate from another platform, WordPress is almost certainly a good fit for your needs.
The Bottom Line
By examining the data and trends, it‘s clear that WordPress will continue its reign as the world‘s most popular CMS for the foreseeable future.
Its user-friendly interface, huge selection of plugins and themes, helpful community, and wide-ranging flexibility make it the go-to choice for bloggers, business owners, developers and everyone in between.
As we head into 2024, WordPress is poised for even more growth and adoption across the web. New features, better performance, and an ever-expanding ecosystem of tools and support will solidify its status as the best CMS.
The only question left is: what kind of awesome website will you create with WordPress this year? The possibilities are endless.
