WordPress is one of the most widely used tools for publishing on the web. The available figures show its scale through market share, release history, themes, plugins, international usage, and recent development activity. Together, these WordPress statistics offer a useful picture of a platform that serves both everyday publishers and large websites.
Contents
- WordPress market share
- Growth compared with other platforms
- Releases and website scale
- Themes and plugins
- Global language and country statistics
- WordPress among major websites
- Recent development and community figures
WordPress market share
WordPress powers over 43% of the internet, according to the WordPress.com Market Share article. A more specific measurement from April 17, 2025, placed WordPress on 43.4% of all websites on the internet. These figures describe the share of websites using the platform, not the share of internet users or web traffic.
Among websites that use a content management system, WordPress held a 61.4% share, also according to the WordPress.com Market Share article. This distinction matters: CMS market share excludes sites that do not use a recognized content management system, while the all-websites figure includes the entire measured website population.
The same source says WordPress market share has more than doubled over the last decade. It also reports that WordPress represented only 0.8% of the market almost 20 years ago. The two figures describe a long-term change in platform adoption, although the source does not provide a complete year-by-year series in the available data.
As of April 17, 2025, websites without a CMS accounted for 29.1% of sites. The remaining named platforms in the comparison were much smaller than WordPress: Shopify had 4.8% market share, Wix had 3.7%, Squarespace had 2.3%, Joomla had 1.5%, and Drupal had 0.8%. All of these measurements are attributed to the WordPress.com Market Share article and refer to the April 17, 2025 comparison.
Growth compared with other platforms
The WordPress.com Market Share article also describes how several website builders changed between 2014 and 2025. Shopify, Wix, and Squarespace each started at 0.1% market share in 2014. By 2025, Shopify had reached 4.8%, Wix had reached 3.7%, and Squarespace had reached 2.3%.
Joomla and Drupal moved in the opposite direction over that period. Joomla fell from 3.3% in 2014 to 1.5% in 2025, while Drupal fell from 1.9% in 2014 to 0.8% in 2025. These comparisons show that the broader website-platform market has not moved uniformly: some hosted builders expanded, while two established open-source CMS competitors recorded lower shares in the supplied comparison.
| Platform | 2014 share | 2025 share | Direction in the comparison |
|---|---|---|---|
| Shopify | 0.1% | 4.8% | Increased |
| Wix | 0.1% | 3.7% | Increased |
| Squarespace | 0.1% | 2.3% | Increased |
| Joomla | 3.3% | 1.5% | Decreased |
| Drupal | 1.9% | 0.8% | Decreased |
The figures in this table are market-share measurements reported by the WordPress.com Market Share article. They should be read as a historical comparison between the stated years, not as a forecast of future platform adoption.
Releases and website scale
WordPress has had 52 major releases since 2003, according to the WordPress.com Market Share article. Including security and bug-fix releases, the platform has had more than 760 total releases. The difference between these counts illustrates how the project’s visible feature releases sit within a much larger stream of maintenance and security work.
BuiltWith’s relevant sampling pool contained about 70 million websites as of April 3, 2025. Based on that sampling pool, the WordPress.com Market Share article says the figures imply roughly 30 million WordPress websites worldwide. “About” and “roughly” are important here: the sampling pool and the resulting WordPress total are estimates, not a census of every website on the internet.
The platform’s size is also reflected in the range of choices available to site owners. The WordPress.org theme directory contained more than 13,000 themes, while ThemeForest had another 12,000 WordPress themes. These counts describe available theme listings at the time represented by the source; they do not indicate that every theme is active, equally maintained, or equally suitable for a particular site.
Themes and plugins
WordPress’s plugin directory had more than 59,000 free plugins, according to the WordPress.com Market Share article. A later State of the Word 2025 report said the directory had surpassed 60,000 plugins. Because the two counts come from different source labels and reporting points, they are best understood as separate milestones rather than values to add together.
The most-installed plugins in the available WordPress.org figures were led by four products with more than 10 million installations each: Elementor, Contact Form 7, Yoast SEO, and Classic Editor. WooCommerce had more than 8 million installations.
Several other plugins each had more than 5 million or 6 million installations. LiteSpeed Cache, Akismet, and WPForms each had more than 6 million installations. All-in-One WP Migration and Wordfence Security each had more than 5 million installations. These are installation counts reported through the WordPress.org figures cited by the WordPress.com Market Share article, so “more than” means the published threshold is a floor rather than an exact total.
The plugin numbers also show the breadth of common WordPress needs. Page building, contact forms, search optimization, editing, commerce, caching, spam protection, migration, and security all appear among the leading installation totals. The counts alone do not measure quality or performance, but they do quantify the reach of widely adopted tools.
Global language and country statistics
WordPress was translated into 208 locales, according to the WordPress.com Market Share article. The same source says that more non-English WordPress installations exist than English installations. This is a distribution statement about installations by language, not a claim that any one non-English language has more installations than English.
The State of the Word 2025 report gives a more recent broad measure: over 56% of WordPress sites now run in languages other than English. It also identifies Japanese as 5.82% of WordPress usage by language. The 56% figure and the 5.82% figure come from that 2025 report, while the 208-locale count and the earlier comparison between non-English and English installations come from the WordPress.com Market Share article.
Japan provides a country-specific example of strong adoption. In Japan, WordPress powers 58.5% of all websites, according to the WordPress.com Market Share article. The same article cites State of the Word 2024 for an 83% WordPress CMS market share in Japan. The first percentage uses all websites as its base; the second uses CMS-based websites, so they measure different populations.
For readers building a site for an international audience, these figures make the platform’s localization scale concrete. Translation coverage and non-English usage are measurable parts of WordPress’s reach, while Japan’s two percentages show how the result changes when the denominator moves from all websites to CMS websites.
WordPress among major websites
WordPress had a 49.4% share among the top 1,000 websites, according to the WordPress.com Market Share article. Its share among those top 1,000 websites rose by 2.3 percentage points year over year. The source does not provide the underlying list or a full breakdown of the year-over-year comparison in the supplied facts, so the figure should be read as a reported snapshot and change measurement.
This statistic is useful alongside the broader 43.4% all-websites measurement from April 17, 2025, but the populations are not identical. One figure covers all websites in the stated measurement, while the other focuses on the top 1,000 websites. Comparing them directly as though they were the same sample would overstate what the data shows.
Recent development and community figures
The State of the Word 2025 report recorded more than 1,500 themes released in 2025. It also reported that plugin downloads were on pace to reach 2.1 billion by year-end. “On pace” identifies a projection, not a completed year-end total, so the number should be treated as a forecast from the reporting point.
WordPress 6.8 had 921 contributors and 79.5 million downloads, according to the State of the Word 2025 report. WordPress 6.9 had 230 first-time contributors and shipped with more than 340 enhancements and fixes. These figures describe specific releases and should not be combined into a single total for all WordPress development activity.
Taken together, the release figures show both continuity and participation. The platform has accumulated more than 760 releases overall, while individual recent versions have involved hundreds of contributors. The 230 first-time contributors associated with WordPress 6.9 also quantify one route by which the project continues to bring new people into its development community.
The available statistics therefore describe WordPress at several scales: more than 43% of the internet, a 61.4% CMS share, about 30 million sites implied by a 70-million-site sampling pool, tens of thousands of themes and plugins, usage across 208 locales, and recent releases supported by substantial contributor and download activity. Each number has its own date, geography, denominator, or estimate status, so keeping those details attached is essential when using WordPress statistics to understand the platform.