Nearly 80 percent of WordPress users are making revenue (survey)

Most WordPress users see the service as more than just a blogging platform but rather as a full-fledged content management system, according to a new survey.

Thus, these users want WordPress to act and deliver tools that live up to this expectation.

The survey was conducted by WooThemes, a theme and platform provider for professional WordPress sites, helping businesses with customizable features and performance.

The overall purpose of the poll was to get a better understanding of the primary skills and uses of the open source blogging platform, to see if/how users are monetizing WordPress, and what these users think are missing from the service.

Here are some of the highlights from the survey as WordPress stands now in the minds of these respondents after its latest upgrade:

• Experience: Approximately 90 percent of WordPress users have more than a year of WP experience; almost half have over three years. Nearly all of these users call themselves "developers" or "designers."
• Purpose: WordPress has an almost equal mix of users designing sites for personal and business purposes. (60 percent use WordPress for client services.)
• Monetization: Almost most 80 percent across the board are making revenue from their sites.

Some of the aspects of WordPress that delights its users include that it is a scalable platform as well as its "Tumblr-like" simplicity mixed with the complexity of web app frameworks.

Of course, there is always room for improvement. Here's some of the improvements that some users would like to see:

• Less plug-ins
• More do-it-yourself functionality
• Responsive web design (more focus on the user interface and experience)
• More fully integrated features with better reliability and refined functionality

For reference, the survey results are based upon more than 2,000 responses from polling over 100,000 WooThemes clients on WordPress.

[Graphic via WooThemes]

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