Note: This blog post was updated on September 15, 2013. The original publish date was February 29, 2012. Two new screenshots with captions included.
We've recently been approached by a charity that was looking for a company to build an online shop. This was a small charity unable to afford a lot of money to use a bespoke CMS, and therefore, their options were limited to open-source software solutions that could be modified to suit the organization's needs and branding. Our recommendation was to use WordPress.
In order to strengthen the validity of our CMS recommendation, we've done some research on the WordPress CMS usage statistics and would like to share them with you in this blog post. In a nutshell, WordPress is the most commonly used CMS online. Let's take a look at the slides below:
The above screenshot was taken on February 29, 2012
UPDATE: Take a look at the screenshot below taken from WordPress.com on September 15, 2013
(looks like the number of WP sites went down by about 1 million. Why?):
According to W3Techs, 70.7% websites do not use a content management system (CMS) at all. Out of 29.3% of the sites that use a CMS, 53.8% is attributed to WordPress, which means that 15.8% of all sites currently operating online give preference to WP. This is a huge market share, which also means that WordPress has an enormous community of developers who constantly generate new plugins and participate on the Q&A sites.
Additional data from http://trends.builtwith.com/cms shows that in the top million sites, WordPress CMS is used in 63.28% of the cases compared to other content management systems.
UPDATE: The chart below shows the new data as of September 15, 2013.
Looks like WordPress lost about 20% of the market since Feb 29, 2012:
In addition, we notice a significant percentage of CMS users who decide to migrate to WordPress from another platform:
If we look at the statistics that show the WordPress usage for Ecommerce and compare it to other Ecommerce CMS, we see that 4.10% is attributed to WP. We know of 5,135 sites using WP e-Commerce (GetShopped.org).
Is WordPress a good option for your CMS? Please share your comments below.
