Web Development: How Many Websites Use WordPress?

Friday, August 21, 2020

How Many Websites Use WordPress?

How big is WordPress? How many websites use WordPress? These are a couple of the questions I’ll be answering right now, as of mid 2020. Let’s dive in!

How Big is WordPress?

Here’s a complete video version of this article. Don’t forget to subscribe to our Envato Tuts+ YouTube channel for tutorials, free courses, and more!

There’s a very good chance you already know that WordPress is a very popular CMS (Content Management System) which started life way back in 2003 as a relatively simple blogging tool. Since then, however, WordPress has evolved into the most versatile website building tool available; capable of building sites of all kinds and sizes.

How Many Websites Use WordPress These Days?

To answer this question we first need to determine how many active websites there currently are.

This June 2020 Survey of web servers by NetCraft suggests that there are currently between 1.2Bn and 1.3Bn active websites across the world.

To find out how many of these are powered by WordPress we can visit WordPress.com which tells us on the homepage that “37% of the web is built on WordPress”.

37% of 1.2 to 1.3Bn? Between 444 and 481 million websites.

WordPress Amongst the Top Websites

You can also check out the BuiltWith website which gives updated figures for all kinds of web platforms. Their figures are compiled slightly differently, but state that

“We know of at least 27,021,750 live websites using WordPress.”

This chart shows the growth of WordPress amongst the top 1M websites; there being currently around 320,000 (just lower than the 37% claimed by WordPress itself).

How Many WordPress Websites are Self Hosted?

WordPress.org gives us an interesting statistic; the download counter for the current version. The current WordPress version is updated all the time, but take a look at where things stand now.

Answer: Lots

In answer to the question “how many websites use WordPress?” the answer is simple: a lot. It’s always wise to get your statistics from a number of sources, but whichever number you pick from above you can’t help but be impressed by the dominance and growth of WordPress.

Don’t forget to keep checking back for WordPress tutorials, videos, and resources, right here on Tuts+!