WordPress, long known to be the No. 1 content management system (CMS) in use online, has reached a new milestone: It now powers 25 percent of all sites across the web. That’s according to the newest data from W3Techs, a company that tracks the usage of different web technologies. (W3Techs explains its methodology in the blog post I’m linking to above.)
It’s far and away the most popular CMS, with the next two closest competitors — Joomla and Drupal — powering less than five percent of all websites.
We have indicators that WordPress is likely to grow even further. In October, 29.5 percent of new sites used WordPress, and new sites usually show where the whole market is heading.
If we look at sites that changed their CMS technology recently, we see that WordPress is mostly gaining from Joomla, Drupal and Blogger. There are also systems that gain more sites from WordPress than they lose, most notably Magento, Squarespace and Shopify, but compared to the overall WordPress user base, these numbers are almost negligible.
WordPress is not only the most popular CMS, it is also the fastest-growing system: Every 74 seconds a site within the top 10 million starts using WordPress. Compare this with Shopify, the second-fastest growing CMS, which is gaining a new site every 22 minutes.
WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg celebrated the news on his own blog, noting the chart above and the high percentage of sites not using any CMS at all.
“The big opportunity is still the 57 percent of websites that don’t use any identifiable CMS yet,” he wrote, “and that’s where I think there is still a ton of growth for us (and I’m also rooting for all the other open source CMSes).”
Earlier this year, a report from the online security company CodeGuard gave WordPress credit for 79 percent market share among about 250,000 small business websites that CodeGuard monitors.