State of the Word 2011

There’s no doubt about it, WordPress is a great software platform on which you can build truly unique web sites and blogs. WordPress first started in 2003 and due to strong growth it has developed to be the largest self-hosted blogging tool in the world, used on millions of web sites and seen by tens of millions of people every day.

The community around WordPress organise regular events held all over the world to gather and educate WordPress users on the latest developments. Matt Mullenweg, co founder of WordPress, recently spoke about the growth, innovation and evolution of WordPress at the most recent WordCamp in San Francisco.

The presentation is fascinating and I do encourage you to view the full presentation, it’s available here: WordPress.tv.

I have provided below various highlights from Matt Mullenweg’s State of the Word 2011 presentation which reveals some key takeaways and gives great insight into the evolution and current usage.

A main feature of the presentation includes a survey by 18,000 respondents from all over the world. The purpose of the survey was to gain insight into the users of WordPress. The survey reveals some very interesting statistics about the use of WordPress and I have outlined the most impressive findings below:

• 15.5% of all websites in the world are running WordPress, which is a 54.1%+ market share amongst CMS platforms.
• In the US out of every 100 newly registered domain names, 22 are running WordPress
• 65% of consultants & companies customise wordpress to be very unrecogniseable with heavy customisation
• 92% of survey respondents use wordpress as a cms (3 years ago was 5%) transformation of wp as a cms has reached almost full penetration 8% use it just for a blog
• The survey asked what is the best thing about using WordPress? The round-about answer of course being ease of use / easy to use for the consumer through the dashboard.

Simply put: everybody loves ease of use, perhaps this the reason for WordPress’ high adoption rate which is ever growing at an accelerating pace. There were over 1/2 million downloads in first few days of the release of WordPress Version 3.2, which is the fastest take up of WordPress ever.

The approach to WordPress’ continued development provides additional functionality and tons of answers that gets the developers involved and invokes particular thoughts and feelings in relation to the product.

In conclusion, WordPress grows ever better and will dominate the web site world for a long time to come.