Ike Paz: Today we have a special guest writer and content creator: Colin Cieloha. Colin is a territory manager over at Skilled.co. He delved deep into his research to create the “28 Facts You Probably Don’t Know About WordPress” infograph and report. I’m thoroughly impressed by the facts presented here…
Colin Cieloha: The infographic below containing 28 facts you probably did not know about WordPress is the final product of careful research and data collection. The creators of the infographic have analyzed large amounts of data from over 30 relevant and reliable sources and turned them into a stunning piece of visual storytelling.
If you take a look at the infographic you will find all the information about WordPress mentioned in the article and plenty more to feast your eyes on.
Why Choose WordPress As Your CMS?
Building your own website and publishing content on the web has never been easier and it is all thanks to content management systems (CMS). It is now easy to build fully functional, user-friendly and visually appealing websites without having to slave over endless lines of code.
Content management software such as WordPress allows anyone, including complete web design novices to easily organize, edit and publish web content. CMS provides website owners with near-total independence in terms of content management.
This allows them to update and modify their content the way that they deem best.
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A big part of the appeal of these platforms is their multi-functionality. Content management systems like WordPress provide all the tools needed for website creation in one place.
The CMS market is a fast-evolving one with dozens of competing software available for free. WordPress is still the number one choice for the majority of CMS users. WordPress is just over a decade old and has established itself as the market leader among competitors such as Joomla, Drupal, Magento and Blogger.
WordPress has a straightforward interface, thousands of free themes and plugins and an ever-growing potential of customization which has kept it at the very top of the CMS market for years.
While there is a long list of advantages to using WordPress, the most popular CMS on the market is also a frequent target of cyber attacks.
Even though WordPress is constantly working on enhancing the security of its users’ websites, there have been several notable security breaches associated with WordPress-based websites in the past.
Despite the security issues WordPress is still going strong. Since 2016 WordPress has powered million of websites, including many of the world’s best known websites.
If a website is CMS-based, chances are it is running on WordPress. These days, everyone from low-profile bloggers to world-famous brands, companies and celebrities are using WordPress.
The Growing Popularity of WordPress
In terms of market share the formula for success is simple: the higher the market share, the bigger the profit. WordPress holds the largest share of the content management system market with 59.3%.
The second-most popular CMS is Joomla which has a market share of 6.2% followed by Drupal with 4.9%, Magento with 2.8% and Blogger has a market share of 2.6%. Other content management tools hold a combined market share of 24.2%.
However, when it comes to average yearly salaries of CMS developers, Drupal developers lead the way with a salary of $84,000.
This is followed closely by Joomla developers who earn $82,000 a year and finally WordPress developers with an average annual income of $79,000.
‘WordPress’ when typed into Google search will bring up 1.6 billion search results.
The following are just some of the many impressive statistics highlighting the popularity of the world’s leading CMS:
- WordPress powers more than 17 million websites.
- WordPress 4.6 “Pepper” released on August 16 2016 has been downloaded over 3.8 million times in just a few months.
- WordPress users write 69.8 million new posts every month on average which amounts to over 542 million words per day.
- Another strong indicator of the enduring popularity of WordPress is the marked increase in page-views on WordPress-powered blogs over the years.
The number of page views across blogs on WordPress.com has increased nearly twofold since 2013. WordPress blogs had 11.2 billion pageviews in 2013, 15.8 billion in 2014 and 19.8 billion in 2015. This year the number of page views grew to an unprecedented 22.2 billion.
What WordPress Offers…
One of the main attractions of WordPress is its generous offer of thousands of easily-installed free themes and plugins. WordPress users can currently choose between 46,291 free plugins and 4,081 free themes.
The data obtained from the most popular online theme marketplace ThemeForest shows that trading in WordPress themes is a highly lucrative business.
- Approximately 50% of all WordPress themes make $1000 a month,
- 25% of themes bring in a monthly figure of $2500 and 15% of WordPress themes make $5000 each a month.
- The data also reported that 7% of themes make $7500 a month and 5% of themes make their developers up to $10,000 every month.
The current top free themes on WordPress are Responsive, Customizr, Zerif Life, Vantage and Hueman. The most popular premium themes are:
- Avada with 1724 units sold every week
- X the Theme with 901 sold units
- Enfold with 617
- Betheme with 529
- Bridge with 501 sold units.
As for the free plugins available on WordPress, the top most downloaded ones are Regenerate Thumbnail, Aksimet, Woo Commerce, Yoast SEO and Hello Dolly.
The best-selling plugins include Visual Composer with 2340 units sold per week, Slider Revolution with 1411, LayerSlider with 214, Ultimate Addons with 212 and UberMenu with 188 weekly sold units.
Notable WordPress Companies
Automattic might not be as recognizable a name as WordPress but it is in fact the name of the corporation that owns WordPress.com. Founded in 2005 the parent company of WordPress has 490 employees under its wing. This fast growing web development company notably raised $190.6 million from 15 investors during 9 years.
Have you ever wondered who is behind all of the popular and profitable WordPress themes and plugins? The name of the company that produces WordPress tools is Envato.
The Melbourne-based startup has 180 employees and 80 contractors working from around the globe. In 2015 Envato’s earnings surpassed the figure of $400 million.
WPEngine is the name of the hosted service provider that powers WordPress-based websites and apps. Over the period of 5 years, the Texas-based company that employs 313 people raised $40.712 million.
Famous WordPress Users
In addition to millions of WordPress users from different industry niches, the number one CMS in the world also boast a noteworthy list of famous clients. These include popular information sites, technology blogs, big brand names, multinational corporations as well as globally popular individuals in the entertainment industry.
Some of the world’s most visited news websites are powered by WordPress. Both London-based international news agency Reuters and the Gray Lady herself rely on WordPress for publishing on the web.
WordPress is used by leading business and finance focused magazines and newspapers. These magazines and newspapers include The Wall Street Journal, Forbes and Harvard Business Review. A number of leading technology blogs are powered by WordPress as well, including Mashable, Digg, Boing Boing, TechCrunch, IGN, and others.
For global brands like Coca-Cola, Samsung and Mercedes-Benz decade-long traditions of customer loyalty are not the only thing they have in common. These big industry names alongside Sony-owned gaming brand PlayStation and the Star Wars franchise are all owners of WordPress-based blogs.
Top celebrities that use WordPress include Jay Z, Russell Brand, Sir Tom Jones, Kobe Bryant and Sylvester Stallone.
Vulnerabilities and security breaches
WordPress is the most popular free CMS in the world and is continuously growing its user base and high profile clients. This comes with a price and for WordPress this means dealing with frequent security issues and data breaches.
As the most widely used content management software on the market, WordPress is also the most likely one to get attacked. The results of the latest surveys on CMS vulnerabilities and data hacks in 2016 show that 78% of hacked CMS-based websites were powered by WordPress:
- Joomla-powered sites were hacked 14% of the time
- Hacks on Magento-based websites accounted for 5% of the attacks
- Websites using Drupal were attacked 2% of the time
WordPress offers thousands of free themes and plugins. These third-party add-ons are often used by hackers to access user accounts and compromise private data. This is often done through Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. One of the most notable WordPress security breaches occurred in 2011 where 18 million WordPress blogs were compromised as a result of such an attack. In 2014 WordPress suffered two serious DDoS attacks.
The first one took place in March when more than 162,000 WordPress sites were used by hackers to launch a DDoS attack while the second one occurred in September, following the leak of 5 million Google accounts. As a result of the September DDoS attack, WordPress was forced to reset 100,000 passwords in order to protect its users.
Earlier this year it was revealed that out-of-date WordPress plugins were the among the likely sources of the Panama Papers Breach. This was one of the largest security breaches in recent history.
It occurred when an unnamed whistleblower released 2.6 TB of data and 11.5 million documents to a German newspaper. The leaked documents produced by the Mossack Fonseca law firm located in Panama, contained sensitive information regarding various financial wrongdoings of thousands of public officials, heads of government and CEOs.
WordPress In a Nutshell “Awesome”!
Ike Paz: I wanted to thank Colin Cieloha for providing such a detailed report and WordPress Infographic. I learned a lot about my favorite content management system. I’ve been using WordPress for about a decade now, and I’m continually impressed by it’s performance and reliability.
Did we miss anything? If yes, let us know in the comments section below.