WordPress, the leading CMS globally, powers over 38 million websites. This overview presents the latest market share stats, historical trends, main competitors, and popular plugins, highlighting its role in the CMS market. 📊
Key Findings
- 43.1% of all websites use WordPress.
- 63.1% of websites with a known CMS use WordPress.
- Roughly 71.7% of all websites using WordPress are running on the latest Version 6.
- 64 content management systems claim at least a 0.1% market share each.
- Overall, 62 WordPress plugins have over 1 million active installations each.
WordPress Market Share
WordPress market share reached 43.1% across all websites in July 2023.
Among the websites with a known CMS (content management system), that percentage is 63.1%.
Is WordPress Market Share Growing or Slowing?
The growth of WordPress’ market share is quite impressive 🔥. Here at Themeisle, we’ve been tracking this growth for the past six years. Here’s how WordPress market share changed in this time:
Between 2012 and 2023, WordPress market share among websites with known content management systems has grown from 54.3% to 63.7%.
Despite its dominant position during all of the years with available data, WordPress growth slightly declined to 63.1% in July 2023, down from an all-time high of 65.2% in January 2022.
👉 Here’s a complete overview of WordPress CMS market share since 2012:
WordPress Competitors Market Share
Recent CMS market share statistics show that 64 content management systems claim at least a 0.1% market share each in the global market.
Despite the vast choice of CMSes available, only Squarespace, Wix, Shopify, and WordPress achieved a market share greater than 3.0% individually (claiming roughly 75.5% of the market).
👉 Here’s a complete list of WordPress competitors (excluding software applications with less than 0.1% market share in the CMS category):
How has the market share of the top five WordPress competitors changed over time?
- Looking at the top five WordPress competitors’ market share, Shopify grew its usage share by 5.5% since 2014 (from 0.3% to 5.8%), more than any other WordPress alternative.
- Both Wix and Squarespace saw market share growth over the past years, reaching 3.6% and 3.0% in July 2023, respectively.
- Despite Joomla and Drupal claiming collectively 14.8% of the CMS market back in January 2014 – the heyday of Joomla’s popularity, these systems lost in popularity over past years (totaling only 4.5% of the market share in July 2023).
👉 Here’s how the market share of the leading content management systems (excluding WordPress) has evolved since 2014:
WordPress Version Market Share
Roughly 71.7% of all websites using WordPress are running on the latest Version 6 (initially released in May 2022), followed by Version 5 (22.1%) and Version 4 (5.7%).
👉 Here’s a complete breakdown of the WordPress version market share as of July 2023:
WordPress Plugins Market Share
Out of roughly 59,500 free plugins available in the WordPress directory, 10 plugins have crossed a milestone of over 5 million active installations:
- Contact Form 7
- Elementor
- Yoast SEO
- Classic Editor
- WooCommerce
- Akismet
- Contact Form by WPForms
- All-in-One WP Migration
- Really Simple SSL
- Jetpack
Overall, 62 WordPress plugins have over 1 million active installations each. 🤸♂️
📋 WordPress plugins with more than 1M active installations
👉 Here’s a complete list of popular WordPress plugins (sorted by active installs count; over 1 million only):
FAQ – Why is WordPress so popular?
How many websites use WordPress?
Roughly 38.54 million currently active websites using WordPress.
How many websites use WordPress VIP?
Around 864 active websites using WordPress VIP (enterprise version of the leading CMS).
How many WordPress plugins are there?
Around 59,500 free plugins are available to download from the WordPress plugin directory as of July 2023 (that’s up from 55,661 plugins available in the directory back in July 2018).
How many WordPress themes are there?
WordPress theme directory had about 11,700 free WordPress themes available to install in July 2023 (representing a 44.68% 3-year increase with 7,647 available themes in July 2020).