Between the Lines

Larry Dignan, Andrew Nusca and Rachel King

WordPress powers 14.7 percent of top million sites worldwide

By | August 19, 2011, 10:29am PDT

Summary: Based on an in-house survey, WordPress powers a considerable chunk of websites domestically and abroad.

WordPress continues to prove itself as a considerable force on an international level when it comes to website building.

Based on the company’s first ever user and developer survey, the blogging tool has been found to power 14.7 percent of the top million websites in the world. Apparently that is up 8.5 percent, at least according to WordPress  and some other kind of internal statistics if this is really the company’s first user survey.

To get a better idea of where WordPress has a presence and just how crowded that region might be, look at the cluster of pinpoints on the map of survey respondents below:

As for the United States, WordPress is used to power 22 out of every 100 new active domains.

So why has WordPress become such a popular tool worldwide? Well, it’s not that hard to figure out. There are at least two easy reasons: it’s easy to use and it’s cheap — even free for those who don’t buy a domain name.

WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg explained on his company’s official blog:

We found a few interesting tidbits from the survey responses already, including that 6,800 self-employed respondents were responsible for over 170,000 sites personally, and charged a median hourly rate of $50. In tough economic times, it’s heartening to see Open Source creating so many jobs. (If each site took only 3 hours to make, that’s $29.5M of work at the average hourly rate.)

Mullenweg added, likely in jest, that there is still “85.3 [percent] of the web that needs help.”

The survey was based on more than 18,000 responses.

Related:

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Rachel King is a staff writer for ZDNet based in San Francisco.

Disclosure

Rachel King

Rachel King has no business relationships, affiliations, investments, or other potential conflicts of interest relating to the content posted in this blog.

Biography

Rachel King

Rachel King is a staff writer for CBS Interactive in San Francisco. Before serving as a contributing editor at ZDNet in New York City for two years, she previously worked for The Business Insider, FastCompany.com, CNN's San Francisco bureau and the U.S. Department of State. Rachel has also written for MainStreet.com, Irish America Magazine and the New York Daily News, among others. Rachel has a B.A. in Mass Communications and History from the University of California, Berkeley and a M.S. in Journalism from Columbia University, where she served as art director for the student magazine, Plated.

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I took down my old site to avoid conflict of interest @my job
Dietrich T. Schmitz * Your Linux Advocate 20th Aug
@Knix96
What you see is simply a reinstall of Plone without any modification. Haven't had time to do anything w/it.

When I was an IT Consultant, the other site was feature-laden.

My point?: Overall Plone is safest of all CMSs.
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Nice statistic. And the world's hackers love to hack it.
Dietrich T. Schmitz * Your Linux Advocate 19th Aug
My personal preference: Plone
(There's a reason why the CIA and FBI use it too.)
@Dietrich T. Schmitz * Your Linux Advocate


I think i saw your website looks pretty plain to me...
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I took down my old site to avoid conflict of interest @my job
Dietrich T. Schmitz * Your Linux Advocate 20th Aug
@Knix96
What you see is simply a reinstall of Plone without any modification. Haven't had time to do anything w/it.

When I was an IT Consultant, the other site was feature-laden.

My point?: Overall Plone is safest of all CMSs.
I rand three WP blogs and I never had any problems with hackers unlike board software many fourm used.
Should be even higher IMHO. Wordpress has the best community and the best development base which makes it great for personal blogs and business CMS. We made some great vids for tutorials on getting started with Wordpress for business sites at http://wpthink.com because people were asking so many questions about how to use it to the max.

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