WordPress 20th anniversary, a look at milestones in numbers

WordPress will be celebrating its 20th anniversary on May 27th, 2023. Below are some of the achievements it has made in numbers.

WordPress 20th Anniversary, Milestones Statistics

The story of WordPress in numbers since it celebrated its 10th anniversary in 2013. The statistics shared below are from the WP20 book.

In 2013, WordPress celebrated its tenth anniversary and had grown significantly since its humble beginnings in 2003. At that time, over half of all websites using a content management system (CMS) were powered by WordPress, amounting to 69 million websites or 19% of all online websites. The platform was experiencing rapid growth, with 100,000 new WordPress websites created daily and 500,000 new posts published every day. Users had access to a wide range of options, including 26,252 plugins and 80 new themes approved each month.

Throughout 2013, WordPress continued to see remarkable achievements. It witnessed the creation of 13,704,819 new WordPress blogs, 489,281,136 new blog posts, and 667,675,929 comments. On average, there were 21 comments posted every second.

The importance of plugins grew over time, leading to a significant increase in their numbers. As of the time of writing, there are over 60,000 plugins available for WordPress, a number that had doubled from 30,000 in 2014.

By the end of 2018, WordPress had expanded its reach even further, powering 32.7% of all websites worldwide. In 2019, this number grew to 35.4%, solidifying WordPress as the most preferred CMS for creating a website. The introduction of the new patterns directory and an ever-growing collection of blocks and block-friendly plugins attracted more site builders and expanded WordPress’s user base.

WordPress continued to dominate the CMS market share. In 2018, it held a 32% market share, and by 2019, it powered 43% of all CMS-based websites. In comparison, Joomla held a 3.1% market share in 2018 and 2.9% in 2019, while Drupal went from 2.2% to 1.9%. Although Wix and Squarespace experienced growth, reaching 1.1% and 1.5% respectively in 2019, they still lagged behind WordPress.

By late 2022, Wix managed to increase its market share to 2.4% in the CMS market. However, WordPress maintained its dominant position with over 40% market share. Despite some controversy surrounding WordPress, Wix’s efforts did not significantly impact its market share.

Openverse, an open-source image and sound file search engine, originally known as “CC Search” and a project of Creative Commons became part of the WordPress project in 2021. By the end of 2022, Openverse had amassed 22 million images, 1.5 million audio files, and 50 million requests. As of April 2023, Openverse had grown to house more than 700 million files, all available for free use by anyone.