On today’s episode, we are going to talk about some surprising stats when it comes to WordPress popularity, right here on Your Website Engineer podcast episode 308. Hello, everybody. Welcome back to another episode of Your Website Engineer podcast. My name is Dustin and today we are going to be diving in some of the popularity stats of WordPress. But before we do that, I’ve got one announcement and one plug-in that I want to share with you today.

The first one on the announcement piece is the WordPress 2016 survey is no available. It is a survey that just kind of every year, we go through and we answer a few questions about WordPress and how we use it, and things along those lines. And then usually, Matt Mullenwig uses the stats and the statistics and all the information gathered and compiled from this survey and brings it into the State of the Word Address at WordCamp US. And it’s just kind of a neat idea – it gets into how many people are using WordPress for business or for pleasure, who’s making a full-time living from WordPress and all these kind of stats. And so there’s about 15 questions, and it depends on how you answer the questions on how many of those questions you’ll actually get.

And then it says it won’t take you any more than five to eight minutes in total. It’ll help a lot of people in the WordPress community, and it will be presented in the Word Camp US in December. And all the data is anonymized; no email addresses, no IP addresses will be associated with the results in any way. So if you’ve got a few minutes – five to eight, to be precise – can you go out to – hey, if you just head on over to WordPress.org, there’s a red banner at the top and it lets you know how to start that survey. And of course as always, there will be a link in the show notes in Episode No. 308.

In the “is there a plug-in for that section,” this one kind of caught my eye and this one is called “WordPress book list.” This is a plug-in that allows you to create an online library. You can display tons of information about your favorite books right on your website. And so it’s just san easy way to record categories for your library. Whether they’re books that you own, or books that you want to read about, or books that you recommend, it’s just really a neat plug-in. It’s a plug-in that’s brand new; it hasn’t been out there very long. But it’s something that just has a lot of, I think, value in it and it helps you – I don’t know. I always find that it’s very hard – I don't like the way that books are displayed with Amazon link as much, but this just has a really nice way of displaying the cover art.

It just goes out there, it scours the web, it gets the information and just pulls it into your website. You don’t have to go and find an image and all that good jazz. So you’ve got all kinds of information in there. There’s screenshots, and it just looks like a really, really, nice plug-in. so if you have ant interest for this, or you have any need for this, I definitely recommend checking out WordPress Booklist. You can find it by searching that in the WordPress repository, or search for the – get the link in the show notes for Episode No. 308.

Today, I just want to share some statistics that I read on an article over on the TorqueMag, and you can find out more at TorqueMag.io. These are 13 surprising WordPress statistics. The article was originally written in November of 2014 but then updated last week to just include all the numbers for 2016. So I though these were really, really interesting to me. Some of them, actually I was quite shocked at. I’m just really excited that WordPress on the world and the community.

So let’s go ahead and just dive into these. They’re mainly to let you know that if you’re wondering whether WordPress or other platforms that WordPress is obviously the way to go; you’re listening to a WordPress show so I would hope that you would understand that. Some of these statistics are just kind of mind blowing at how prevalent WordPress is out there in the world. WordPress powers almost 27 percent of the entire internet. And so WordPress is the most popular CMS. So of all the websites in the world, 27 percent of those are WordPress; 54 percent of those don’t run any CMS at all.

So we’ve got 27 percent for WordPress. Joomla comes in at 6.3 percent, and Drupal comes in at 4.8 percent. So we’ve got almost 11 percent between the two of those combined. And so just really a big deal of how big WordPress is. There’s more than a billion websites online today, so if you do a little math, 27 percent of a billion, that’s how many websites are out there running WordPress.

Alright, the second interesting fact, or mind blowing fact if you will, is that WordPress site around the world posts 24 times per second. So every second somebody is clicking that blue button to publish a post 24 times, which is really crazy. But these are only the numbers for sites that are on the WordPress network, meaning that they either host at WordPress.com or they are WordPress self-posted sites that have the Jetpack plug-in installed. That’s where all the stats in combination – that’s where all that information is kind of pulled from.

So that’s 24 blog posts per second; that comes down to 1,481 blog posts per minute. That’s more than 88,000 blog posts per hour, and that’s right around 2.3 million per day. That’s not counting in those sites that aren’t running Jetpack; that can’t be counted in these statistics. So that is a lot of posts. That’s a lot of people democratizing publishing and actually publishing on their own sites.

WordPress sites received 22.17 billion monthly page views. It seems that all of this activity, all this blog posts are paying off and resulting in massive traffic. So that is on those same networks so if they’re self-hosted with Jetpack or WordPress.com, they’re getting an average of 22 billion page views per month. That’s three times as many people as there are on the planet. So that’s a lot of page views.

WordPress blogs receive 46.6 million comments per month. And so that is a lot of comments, as well. And that says that if you also look at the Akismet stats, the spam comments generated at the same time is about 30 times higher than that. So, 30 times of 46 million comments. And so that’s bombarded with 1.4 billion spammers at the same time, which is pretty crazy that Akismet works so well to filter all of those out.

Another interesting fact is there are 2.7 million global monthly searches for WordPress. In the United States alone, WordPress as a keyword receives 450,000 search queries every month, and then globally that number is 2.7. And that’s not even talking about people looking for WordPress templates, WordPress plug-ins, WordPress themes and that doesn’t include WP, either. So that is 2.7 monthly searches globally for the word “WordPress,” which is pretty crazy.

Then it looks like WordPress is 5.5 times more popular than Joomla, 9 times more on demand than Drupal. So those statistics will continue to grow. WordPress 4.6 ha been downloaded 21.7 million times, and so that is a lot. It just keeps growing and growing and growing. So when we get to WordPress 4.7, that number is going to surpass that. It seems like every new release gets more and more downloads, more and more installs.

No. 7 is only 40 percent of WordPress sites are actually up-to-date. And so in the past, WordPress often made headlines due to hack sites and security concerns, which makes it hard to address those quickly when new and improved versions are out there. But not all WordPress users share this approach. While the download numbers for the latest version are quite impressive, it looks like there’s 40 percent of websites that are not updated to 4.6

No. 8 is there are 72 translations of WordPress. This is probably the smallest number on this list but it’s significant and it shouldn't be underestimated. Mainly because now when you install WordPress, you can choose one of 72 languages that are out there to install your website, and the entire dashboard experience will be native in whatever language that you choose of those 72 different translations.

The next one is there are more than 47,000 WordPress plug-ins. And this is a far cry from the online stores of Apple and Google. But there’s almost been 1.5 billion downloads for WordPress plug-ins from the WordPress repository.

No. 10, the Akismet plug-in is still the No. 1 downloaded plug-in, and this may come with the fact that it’s installed with every WordPress version so that probably helps a little bit. But it’s still the most downloaded plug-in that’s out there. The second place that is out there right now, as of October 2016, is Contact Form 7, with 42 million downloads and Yost, 34 million downloads. So, that one is very high up there. There’s also Jetpack and WooCommerce are a few of the other ones that are up there in the top handful.

No. 11, last year in 2015 there were 89 WordCamps in 34 countries, with more than 21,000 participants. So WordPress is slowly on the rise and the community is also steadily growing, and the number of word camps just continues to grow and grow and grow. You can find to more heading over to WordCamp.org, and you can find a list and a schedule of all of the WordCamps that are happening across the world and see which ones that you may or may not want to attend and learn from.

This one is really cool, and this is a number a lot higher than I thought it was going to be. But 25 percent of WordPress users make a full-time living off the CMS. So this is pretty crazy that there’s 25 percent of WordPress users, so 1 out of every 4 people are making a full-time living off the CMS. Which that is mind blowing in itself, but then just think about all of those people and all of those jobs, and this once was me. I had my own business building WordPress sites for people, and I was able to make a full-time living just by doing that, on a free piece of software.

If you just step back and think about it, how many millions of sites that are out there but how many people, how many thousands and thousands of people make a full-time living just building WordPress websites, or building WordPress plug-ins, or have some sort of service that’s tied into WordPress in some way, shape or form.

You also have to calculate how much money is made in the WordPress ecosphere. Remember, WordPress is free. There are plug-ins and themes that you have to pay for but at that hourly rate, some WordPress developers charge $100.00 an hour for them to – how much money in revenue, in income is generated with all these people making their full-time living with WordPress. Just another really, really important thing to think about.

Another point is WordPress is the most popular with businesses, and least popular with news sites. So among the top 1 million websites in the world, most of the websites that are published that are WordPress related, they are related to business. They greatly outnumber news sites where the use of WordPress is least popular. I’m not sure why that is or what the correlation or what the alternative platform is that’s out there that would be better for news-type sites. I would think that a WordPress site with different categories and whatnot would be a really great way to build a news-powered site.

So those are some of the stats that are out there. WordPress is continually taking the world by storm. It’s just crazy to see, too, the explosion of not only just WordCamps but like the blogs that are out there talking about WordPress, the podcasts that are out there talking about WordPress. When I started this podcast back in December of 2010, it was mainly because there were no other WordPress podcasts that were out there. There were a couple that had kind of pod-faded. There were a handful of them that had two to seven episodes, but then they just kind of stopped. That’s kind of where I got into it. But now if you look out there, there’s dozens and dozens of WordPress podcasts, all putting their own, unique spin on what’s happening with WordPress, or how to do this with WordPress, or how businesses are successful with WordPress.

And there’s just so many different ways you can take this one, common language that we all speak, WordPress; whether you be brand-new to WordPress, or you’ve been using it for a very long time. It doesn’t matter. There’s so much we can learn from each other using WordPress, and just to see this – like that 27 percent number continuing to grow and grow and grow. I’m trying to remember where that number was when I started at Automatic almost three years ago. I want to say it was in the low, low 20s; 21, 19 to 21-ish in that area about three years ago. So it’s consistently being grown and grown and growing every single year.

So that’s the little bit of statistics and the information that I want to share with you this week. And until next week, take care and enjoy using that very popular WordPress platform. We’ll talk to you again soon. Take care. Bye-bye.