‘A-Z of WordPress’ with Nathan Wrigley and David Waumsley
Hello, It’s another A-Z of WordPress. The series where we attempt to cover all the major aspects of building and maintaining sites with WordPress. Today is for N for Numbers…
Preamble
What we mean by number is interesting and perhaps quirky statistics related to using WordPress. We tend to find ourselves in our own echo chambers on the internet. I guess ours is largely that of people who use WordPress to build client websites, mostly with a page builder.
You really do need to listen to the podcast to follow along with these show notes I think…
General WordPress
- 41.6% of the web. A steady increase of about 2% a year. Closest competition Shopify with 3.6% but with a faster growth – https://w3techs.com/technologies/history_overview/content_management/all/y
- 1,504 Automatticians in 81 countries speaking 100 different languages. They have a map. No-one in China, Thailand, Cambodia, Laos (that we could see), and few in Russia – https://automattic.com/about/
- Languages. English 75% Spanish 4.7% – https://wordpress.com/activity/
- US WordPress developer earns $54k per annum – https://www.payscale.com/research/US/Skill=Wordpress/Salary
- 58,674 plugins – https://wordpress.org/plugins/
- 8,404 themes
- 1083 WordCamps in 65 countries – https://central.wordcamp.org/about/
- Less than a third of All WordPress Installations Are Updated to the Latest Version/ 90% of clean up request to Sucuri come from WordPress – https://kinsta.com/blog/wordpress-statistics/
- WordPress takes care of 80-90% of Google’s crawling issues the former head of Google’s webspam team, Matt Cutts, said that, “sites built with WordPress are capable of ranking higher in search results because the CMS takes care of 80-90% of Google’s crawling issues.” This means WordPress is SEO friendly.
- The most popular and most purchased WordPress theme on ThemeForest (premium WordPress themes and plugins marketplace) is Avada. Avada costs $59 and it has sold over 200,000 copies, which means to date it has generated over $12M in sales, and counting!
Missing stats
https://theplugineconomy.com/wordpress-plugin-active-installs/
What WP is used for…
Plugins with the most installs
- Contact Form 7 (11% according to ‘Built With’, and Gravity Forms is on 2.5 – 3%)
- Yoast SEO (11 million active installs of Yoast SEO (May 2021))
- Classic Editor (Gutenberg 300,000 active downloads and there’s 22,815,564 using core, so it’s not growing?)
- Elementor Website Builder (over 7 million) – https://w3techs.com/technologies/report/cm-elementor Elementor, a WordPress-based website builder, is the fastest growing content management system, besides WordPress itself,it’s at 4.5%
- Akismet Spam Protection
- WooCommerce
- Jetpack
- Really Simple SSL
- WPForms
- WordFence
But…
https://trends.builtwith.com/widgets
Themes with the most installs (according to WordPress.org)
- Twenty Twenty-One (900,000+ hmm!)
- Twenty Twenty (1+ million)
- Astra (1+ million)
- Hello Elementor (700,000+ 10% of E users)
- Twenty Seventeen
- Twenty Nineteen
- OceanWP
- PopularFX
- Neve
- Kadence
But…
https://trends.builtwith.com/framework/wordpress-theme
Top million
- Divi
- Popper (by Morten Rand-Hendriksen)
- Astra Theme
- Avada
- Genesis Framework
- GeneratePress
- Twenty Twenty
- Twenty Seventeen
- Twenty Twenty-One
- Enfold
- Flatsome
- OceanWP
- WordPress has 82.4% CMS market share amongst websites in Japanese, whereas it has “only” 43.9% market share among sites in German.
- 25 November 2020 – WooCommerce is used by more sites than Shopify, Magento, OpenCart and PrestaShop combined.
- Gutenberg has over 3,000 issues and has closed over 12,000 – https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg
- 8 January 2021 – Squarespace is now the fourth most popular content management system, overtaking Drupal and Wix.
- Page Builders seems to have grown since Gutenberg – Elementor, Divi, Brizy, Beaver Builder – Oxygen is missing. There are new ones like Bricks, Live Canvas, Zion Builder, even coming soon plugin has become a page builder!
- Top widgets – Google Fonts 8%, Google Tag manager 6%, Font Awesome 5% then WP 5% Plugins https://trends.builtwith.com/widgets (top 1m)
- 4 May 2021 – For the first time since we started our surveys in 2009, Apache has lost the first spot as the most popular web server to Nginx.
- 8 January 2021 – HTTP/2 is now used by 50% of all websites, up from 42.6% one year ago.
- 2 December 2020 – Facebook Pixel is now used by 10% of all websites, up from 8.7% one year ago.
- ‘Built With’ shows some interesting stats on Web tech the fall of PHP use, but still leading, but you see Vue.js and React being used more.
Top In Web Hosting Usage Distribution in the Top 1 Million Sites
https://trends.builtwith.com/hosting
- Cloudflare Hosting
- Amazon
- Google – why is this different from Google Cloud, I’ve no idea!
- Google Cloud
- Microsoft
- Confluence Networks
- Digital Ocean
- OVH
- GoDaddy
- Domain Not Resolving
- Hetzner
- Microsoft Azure
