WordPress Statistics for 2020

When it first launched in 2003, WordPress (WP) was a simple, free and easy-to-use open-source content management system. However, today, 17 years later, it has completely transformed the software development and digital marketing industries.

When surfing the net you’ll most likely often land on a WordPress-powered website. The platform has become the largest, most popular content management system (CMS) with a market share that increases steadily every year. Its impressive plugins and themes library offers limitless opportunities for creating stunning and functional webpages. What is more, it is used by both SMEs and big Fortune 500 companies like SONY Music, The Walt Disney Company, The Rolling Stone magazine and BBC America.

In this article, we will dive deeper into the WordPress statistics for 2020 to reveal useful insights that can help you improve your online presence. We have collected data from various sources, and we have put our best efforts into choosing and organizing the most recent information.

The History of WordPress Releases [Infographic]

But first, let’s go back and look at the history of WordPress throughout the years to remember once again the long road to becoming the most popular CMS out there.

WordPress Usage and Traffic Stats 2020

The statistics below are for WordPress.org and cover its growth, plugins, themes, hosting, traffic and security. On one hand, this data will give some merit to the popularity and usage of the open-source software. And on the other hand, it will provide you with practical knowledge on the best technologies and practices to build or improve your WordPress website.

• WordPress has a 39% market share of all websites in the world. (Source: W3Techs)
• 63.8% of all CMS websites are using WordPress. (Source: W3Techs)
• 455+ million websites worldwide are powered by WordPress. (Source: Envisage Digital)
• 71% of the WordPress content is in English, but the platform supports 60 languages. (Source: Envisage Digital)
• WordPress has around 58,000 plugins and almost 8,000+ themes in the official WP directory, and many more on the web. (Source: WordPress)
• Around 17 blog posts are published per second. (Source: Kinsta)

• There are more than 37 million global searches with the term ‘WordPress’ every month. (Source: Kinsta)
• More than 409 million users are responsible for more than 20 billion WordPress page views each month, making over 70 million new posts and leaving 77 million new comments. (Source: Envisage Digital)
• WordPress takes care of 80-90% of SEO mechanics. (Source: Hosting Tribunal)
• The WP Version 5 is used by 83.9% of websites, surpassing 7.1 million downloads. (Source: W3Techs)
• 30.91% of the top 1 million websites, 30.5% of the top 100k websites, and 34.34% of the top 10k websites in the world are powered by WordPress. (Source: builtwith.com)
• 1073 Local WordCamps have been organized in 368 cities and 65 countries. (Source: WordCamp Central
• WordPress Version 5.6 (Simone) released in December 2020 has an all-women release squad (Source: WordPress)

WordPress Plugins Insights 2020

WordPress’s huge and growing plugin library is one of the leading reasons for the popularity of the platform. This ecosystem is full of thousands of variations of free and paid tools to help you design a stunning website. Here are several curious facts about some of the most popular WordPress plugins:

• There are around 58,000 plugins for WP with an overall of 1.5 billion downloads  (Source: WordPress and codeinwp).
• More than 1 million sites have every single one of the top 30 WordPress plugins installed (Source: Hosting Tribunal)
• The popular spam protection plugin Akismet has blocked 508+ billion spam comments. (Source: Akismet)
• Contact Form 7 By Takayuki Miyoshi is used by 95,000 of the top 1 million websites. (Source: builtwith.com)
• Wordfence reports as many as 90,000 attacks every minute. (Source: internetdevels)

WooCommerce Stats

• WooCommerce has a 28.24% market share, among the e-commerce plugins and is used by 18.3% of websites. (Sources: Statista & W3Techs)
• WooCommerce supports around 22% of the top 1 million sites with eCommerce technologies. (Source: Kinsta)
• More than 70 million eCommerce shops use WooCommerce. (Source: Kinsta)
• WooCommerce has 300+ paid extensions for extra functionality. (Source: Kinsta)
• WordPress alone offers 1,032 WooCommerce themes. (Source: Envisage Digital)

WordPress Themes Stats

• There are 7,986 themes available in the WordPress theme directory. (Source: WordPress)
• The first known default themes were “Kubrick” and “WordPress Classic”. (Source: Kinsta)
• Since 2010 a new default theme has been released every year, the title of which corresponds with the release year, i.e. Twenty Twenty for 2020. It has over 1 million active Installations since its release. (Source: Kinsta)
• The cost for an average WordPress theme is $57.45, with a golden price point of $59. (Source: codeinwp)

• The price for theme clubs and theme subscriptions varies between $48 and $399 a year, starting from 23 themes from Elmastudio to 55 themes from WooCommerce, respectively. (Source: Kinsta)
• A subscription to a WordPress theme club has an average price of $145. (Source: Kinsta)

Related articles:
Custom-Tailored WordPress Themes vs. Premium Themes
Speed up Your Workflow When Building WordPress Themes
Why You Need to Avoid Nulled WordPress Themes and Plugins

WordPress Security Stats

WordPress is generally pretty secure. However, considering that it’s the largest and most popular CMS platform, it has its fair share of vulnerability.

According to the website security service provider Scuri:

• 62% of websites had SEO spam infections.
• 47% of all infected websites had one or more backdoors attacks.
• Over 56% of all CMS applications were out of date at the time of infection.
• 44% of all vulnerable websites had more than one vulnerable component.
• 53% of reinfections are due to SQL injections.

It is recommended to always use the latest version of WordPress to ensure that all security fixes are applied.

Conclusion

A lot has changed for WordPress over the years. Тhe open-source software has earned its rank as the biggest and most popular CMS by powering more than a third of the world’s websites. But we also love it for its constant improvement, growth and community contributions that make building and scaling websites more effective.

We hope these WordPress Statistics for 2020 provide you with useful insights and give you a better idea of all the ways through which you can optimize your own website.