Very few things have disrupted the digital marketing scene as greatly as WordPress has in the last decade. Thanks to the platform’s free and simple content management system anyone, regardless of levels of technical knowledge, can create impressive websites.
This possibility is bolstered further by the seemingly endless library of themes and plugins.
If you want an online presence today, the WordPress statistics that follow can only help. As you can imagine, we at Hosting Tribunal are huge fans of this CMS. To help you out to get up to speed with its immense possibilities, we put together all the important 2021 WordPress statistics you need.
Some of these showcase the extent of worldwide WordPress domination and also help explain the key reasons behind this popularity, while others give insight toward understanding the WordPress CMS usage better.
The Latest WordPress Statistics (Editor’s Choice)
- WordPress is used by 40.2% of all websites as of September 25, 2026, down from a peak of about 43.6%.
- That is the first sustained decline in WordPress’s share since tracking began.
- Among sites with a known CMS, 58.7% run WordPress, down from 64.1%.
- Shopify is now the second-largest CMS at 7.8%, ahead of Wix, Squarespace and Joomla.
- In 2016, nearly 118 billion words were published on WordPress.
- Roughly 21% of WordPress sites run WooCommerce, up from 13.2%.
- The directory lists roughly 59,000 to 65,000 free plugins and 13,000 to 14,000 free themes.
- WordPress.com now rejects 86% of DMCA takedown notices, amid a rise in AI-generated mass filings.
These facts and numbers are important because WordPress plays a crucial role in the online business environment.
The platform’s capabilities have encouraged companies of all sizes to move to it, leveling the playing field. The prime determiner of how effective your WordPress site is is your creativity, not the cash in your bank. This makes it possible even for small businesses to compete with large, global companies that enjoy massive marketing budgets.
So here we curated an Infographic on how WP is powering the internet
Infographic
WordPress Usage Statistics
WordPress is still the most used CMS on the web by a wide margin. It is also, for the first time in its history, losing share. Both things are true, and the numbers below are dated so you can see which is which.
1. WordPress powers 40.2% of the web, and that share is falling.
(Source: W3Techs, September 25, 2026)
For most of the last two decades this figure only moved in one direction. It does not any more. WordPress peaked at roughly 43.6% of all websites and has declined through 2026, sitting at about 43% at the start of the year and 40.2% as of late September. That is the first sustained decline in WordPress’s share since tracking began.
Context matters before anyone declares a collapse. Losing three points of a 43% share still leaves WordPress running two-fifths of the entire web, more than every other CMS combined. But the direction of travel has genuinely reversed, and any page telling you WordPress share is still climbing is working from old numbers. W3Techs updates daily, so this figure will drift.
2. 58.7% of sites with a known CMS run WordPress.
(Source: W3Techs, September 25, 2026)
Restricting the denominator to sites whose content management system is identifiable puts WordPress just under 59%. That is down from the 64.1% this page previously reported, a decline that tracks the one above.
3. Shopify is now the second-largest CMS, not Joomla.
(Source: W3Techs, September 25, 2026)
Behind WordPress at 58.7%, the field runs Shopify at 7.8%, Wix at 6.2%, Squarespace at 3.6%, Joomla at 1.6% and Drupal at 0.9%. This is a different competitive picture from the one this page used to describe, when Joomla and Drupal were the runners-up. The platforms gaining ground are hosted commercial products rather than self-hosted open-source rivals, which says something about where the pressure on WordPress is coming from.
4. Close to 64 million active WordPress websites, on a conservative estimate.
(Source: Internet Live Stats, year not stated)
There is no definitive count, partly because there is no definitive count of websites overall. This figure derives from Netcraft’s estimate of roughly 200 million active sites and is self-hedged as an estimate in the original source, which does not carry a confirmed year.
5. WordPress added 1.1 million domain registrations every six months.
(Source: BuiltWith, 2015)
This data point is explicitly from 2015 and is kept as historical context.
6. 34% of the world’s 10,000 most popular websites use WordPress.
(Source: WinningWP, year not stated)
WordPress has historically been strong among high-traffic sites, not just small ones. The original source gives no publication year, so treat this as undated.
7. WordPress users publish roughly 70 million posts and 77 million comments a month.
(Source: WordPress.com)
Post volume has been essentially flat since this page last reported it, at about 70 million. Comments have grown meaningfully, from 52.1 million to roughly 77 million.
8. Over 409 million people view more than 21.1 billion pages a month on WordPress sites.
(Source: WordPress.com, year not stated)
These come from the stats system built into WordPress.com blogs. The original figure carries no date.
9. About 21% of WordPress sites run WooCommerce.
(Source: W3Techs)
That is up substantially from the 13.2% this page previously reported. One caution: a separate approach counts live stores directly rather than measuring share, and StoreLeads puts that at roughly 4.17 to 4.6 million live WooCommerce stores. Both show real growth, but they measure different things, and mixing a share with a store count produces a number that means nothing. We have led with the share here because it is comparable with the other W3Techs figures on this page.
10. Akismet blocks 7.5 million spam comments every hour.
(Source: Akismet, year not stated)
Akismet is among the most widely used WordPress plugins. The figure appears on Akismet’s own site and may be a live-updating counter rather than a fixed statistic.
11. The top three WordPress plugins in 2017 were All in One SEO Pack, WordPress Importer and WooCommerce.
(Source: State of the Word, 2017)
Correctly dated to the 2017 State of the Word address. Plugin rankings have moved since.
WordPress Usability Statistics
These are mostly feature and cost claims rather than moving numbers. Several are undated in their original sources, which is noted where it applies.
12. There is a difference between WordPress.org and WordPress.com.
(Source: ThemeIsle)
WordPress.org is the free, open-source software you install and host yourself. WordPress.com is Automattic’s hosted service built on it. This distinction is structural and is worth holding onto while reading the rest of this page, because some figures describe the software and others describe the company.
13. It takes as little as $60 a year to host a good WordPress site.
(Source: WinningWP, year not stated)
Hosting prices drift, and the original source gives no year.
14. A typical domain name costs around $10.
(Source: WinningWP, year not stated)
That is the rough price for a .com, varying by extension and registrar. Also undated.
15. WordPress is platform-agnostic.
(Source: Wikipedia)
It has native applications across common platforms and runs on effectively any standard web host. A structural fact rather than a figure.
16. WordPress is available in 57 languages.
(Source: WordPress, year not stated)
Out of roughly 180 locales identified by the translation project. The original gives no year.
17. The plugin directory lists roughly 59,000 to 65,000 free plugins.
(Source: WordPress.org, via published counts)
Total downloads across the directory now exceed 1 billion. The range reflects the fact that WordPress.org no longer publishes a headline count on the directory page itself, so figures vary between sources depending on when and how they were counted. This page previously cited 47,350 active plugins of 56,311 listed.
18. There are roughly 13,000 to 14,000 free themes.
(Source: WordPress.org, via published counts)
Up from the 4,119 GPL-licensed themes this page previously reported, which is more than a tripling. Commercial themes are additional: ThemeForest alone lists thousands more for purchase.
19. WordPress handles 80 to 90% of the mechanics of SEO.
(Source: Matt Cutts, 2009)
Said in 2009 by the then head of Google’s webspam team. It is quoted constantly without its date, which matters: both WordPress and search have changed considerably since.
20. Over 36% of WordPress sites are served over HTTPS.
(Source: WPEngine, year not stated)
Reported as roughly a 2.5x increase on 2016. The comparison year is given but the report year is not, so the current figure is very likely higher.
21. WordPress needs less than five minutes to install.
(Source: WordPress)
The Famous 5 Minute Install is a long-standing feature of the software rather than a statistic that ages.
General WordPress Statistics
The project, the company behind WordPress.com, and the community around them. These are three different things, and the figures below say which one they describe.
22. WordPress has been around since 2003.
(Source: WinningWP)
The first version shipped on May 27, 2003, making WordPress one of the oldest content management systems still in wide use.
23. WordPress now reports contributors monthly rather than cumulatively.
(Source: WordPress.org, Month in Core)
This page used to cite 44,224 code commits from more than 100 contributors as a cumulative, all-time count. WordPress.org no longer publishes that total. Its official reporting has shifted to a monthly cadence through the “Month in Core” series, which ran at roughly 160 or more active contributors per month as of late 2025.
The two cannot be compared directly, and it would be a mistake to read the smaller monthly number as a shrinking contributor base. One counts everyone who ever contributed, the other counts who contributed in a given month.
24. In-person WordCamps have not recovered from the pandemic.
(Source: WordPress.org community data)
WordPress held 126 WordCamps in 2017, drawing 38,264 attendees, and grew to 144 events and 41,697 attendees by 2019. In 2021 that collapsed to 19 events and 5,582 attendees. By 2023, the most recent full year with published data, it had recovered only to 70 events and 22,637 attendees, around half the pre-pandemic peak.
25. Local meetups follow the same pattern.
(Source: WordPress.org community data)
Meetup events numbered 4,677 in 2017 with 103,915 RSVPs, peaked at 5,961 events and 127,502 RSVPs in 2019, fell to 3,178 events and 70,853 RSVPs in 2021, and had partially recovered to 3,889 events and 77,246 RSVPs by 2023.
Taken together, these two series describe the same story: WordPress’s in-person community grew steadily to 2019, was devastated by the pandemic, and has rebuilt to roughly two-thirds of its former scale rather than returning to it.
26. Automattic’s headcount rose and then fell back.
(Source: Automattic)
Automattic is the company behind WordPress.com, not the open-source WordPress project, and its headcount is a company statistic rather than a measure of WordPress usage. Employee numbers grew substantially from the 1,273 this page previously cited, before a significant round of layoffs in 2025 brought them back down part of the way. The rise on its own would misleadingly suggest steady growth.
27. The average US WordPress developer earned $54,119 a year.
(Source: PayScale, 2022)
Correctly dated to 2022 and not updated here.
28. WordPress.com now rejects 86% of DMCA takedown notices.
(Source: Automattic Transparency Report, H2 2025)
Automattic received 2,431 DMCA takedown notices in the second half of 2025 and acted on 14% of them. Of the rest, 78% were rejected as incomplete and 7% as abusive. Across all notices since 2014, 123,211 in total, 27% have resulted in content being removed.
The reason the rejection rate has climbed from the 61% this page previously reported is more interesting than the number. Automattic’s Trust and Safety team has said it is seeing continued exploitation of the notice-and-takedown system by third-party monitoring services, in some cases through AI-generated mass reporting. Its head of policy described notices aimed at static pages with no content and at search-query URLs whose keywords the complainants had filled in themselves, returning no results. The concern, as Automattic frames it, is that cheap automated filing turns a flawed process into a chilling effect on legitimate publishing.
Key Takeaways
WordPress remains the most used content management system in the world by an enormous margin, running about two-fifths of every website on the internet and nearly 59% of those built on an identifiable CMS. No other platform is close.
What has changed is the direction. After two decades of uninterrupted growth, WordPress’s share has been falling through 2026, and the platforms taking ground are hosted commercial products such as Shopify, Wix and Squarespace rather than self-hosted open-source rivals. The in-person community tells a related story: WordCamps and meetups grew steadily to 2019, collapsed during the pandemic, and have rebuilt to roughly two-thirds of their former scale rather than returning to it.
The ecosystem itself keeps expanding. Free plugins and themes are both far more numerous than when this page was first written, WooCommerce runs on a fifth of WordPress sites, and core development continues at around 160 contributors a month. A mature platform losing a few points of a dominant share is a different story from a platform in decline, and the numbers on this page support the first reading rather than the second.
