WordPress market share

According to W3Techs, WordPress powers 43% of all the websites on the Internet, including those without a content management system (CMS) or with a custom-coded CMS. Or to put it another way, WordPress powers over one-third of the web! And if you limit the data set to only websites with a known CMS, WordPress’ market share gets even more dominant.

In that case, WordPress holds a 65% market share for content management systems on websites with a known CMS. How does that compare to the market share of other popular content management systems? Let’s take a peek:

While much has been made of hosted website builder tools like Squarespace and Wix, the numbers show that WordPress isn’t in any danger of being dethroned any time soon! And WordPress also holds a dominant position over Joomla and Drupal, two other popular self-hosted content management systems.

Is WordPress just used by lots of small sites?

No! To dig deeper into how WordPress’ market share is divided, we turned to BuiltWith. BuiltWith lets you see market share for websites that meet specific criteria, like being in the Quantcast Top 10k (a list that tries to collect the 10,000 most-trafficked websites on the Internet).

Here’s how WordPress’ market share fares when you segment by Quantcast rank:

• Sites in Quantcast Top 10k – WordPress holds a 38.03% market share
• Sites in Quantcast Top 100k – WordPress holds a 35.94% market share

If you compare this to WordPress’ overall market share of 35%, WordPress is even more popular among highly-trafficked websites.

Is WordPress’ market share still growing?

Yes! WordPress’ market share isn’t just “still growing”, it’s actually been consistently growing at roughly the same rate for as long as we have data. So how quickly is WordPress growing? Let’s start with the numbers for last year.

At the start of 2017, WordPress powered 27.3% of all websites. By December 2019, WordPress had made it to the current market share of 35.2%. Some quick math should tell you that WordPress gobbled up an additional 7.9% of the total website market – good for ~28.94% growth.

How does that square up with years past? Here’s WordPress’ overall market share going all the way back to 2011, according to W3Techs:

As you can see, WordPress has been consistently growing its market share by ~1-4% (in overall market share numbers) for the past 8 years. And it shows no signs of slowing down. If this trend continues, it won’t be long until WordPress is powering one-half of all the websites on the Internet.

As of December 2019, WordPress core has had 40,785 commits, 409 releases, and has 58 contributors from around the globe.

How does WordPress’ growth compare with other content management systems?

So WordPress is growing…but is it growing faster than the competition? That’s a trickier question to answer. With respect to self-hosted content management systems, WordPress is still the growth leader.

From 2018 to 2019:

• Joomla’s market share actually decreased from 3.1% to 2.9%
• Drupal’s market share decreased from 2.2% to 1.9%

In terms of year-on-year growth, that means:

• Joomla shrank by 6.4%
• Drupal shrank by 13.6%

While those numbers aren’t keeping pace with WordPress, things are a little bit different with hosted website builders.

While tools like Squarespace and Wix still comprise a tiny percentage of the overall market, they are experiencing rapid growth in comparison to self-hosted content management systems.

From 2018 to 2019:

• Squarespace’s market share increased from 0.7% to 1.5%
• Wix’s market share increased from 0.4% to 1.1%

In terms of year-on-year growth, that means:

• Squarespace grew by 114%
• Wix grew by 175%

So while WordPress is still the dominant player, hosted website builders are growing at a faster rate. You can also see these growth trends play themselves out in Google Trends, where Joomla and Drupal (and to a lesser extent, WordPress) have declined or remained flat, while Squarespace and Wix are generating increasing interest:

While it’s not nearly as popular as WooCommerce, Easy Digital Downloads is still a small, but noticeable, player in the ecommerce industry.

According to BuiltWith, Easy Digital Downloads powers 0.24% of the BuiltWith Top Million (an estimate of the one million most popular websites on the Internet).