28 Facts You Probably Didn’t Know About WordPress

Facts You Probably Didn’t Know About WordPress

Managing, organizing and publishing content online would be next to impossible without the aid of a content management system (CMS).  The most used CMS system to date is WordPress. WordPress is free of charge and is simple to install and use. WordPress was first launched in 2003 and since then, has gained millions of users. The latest version of WordPress has been downloaded 3.8 million times since its release, which is a testament to the enduring popularity of WordPress.

How Popular is WordPress?

If Google search results are an indicator of popularity, then WordPress takes the cake. Typing ‘WordPress’ into Google search brings forth 1.6 billion results. WordPress currently powers 17 million websites. There is currently 69.6 million new posts on WordPress powered sites each month, broken there are more than 542 million words written daily.

Free Themes & Plugins

WordPress owes at least part of its enormous popularity to its full range of free themes and plugins, making it one of the most customizable CMS tools on the market. Users can choose between 46,291 free plugins and 4,081 free themes. Top free plugins include Regenerate Thumbnails, Akismet, WooCommerce, Yoast SEO, and Hello Dolly. The most popular free themes on WordPress are Responsive, Customizr, Zerif Lite, Vantage, and Hueman.

WordPress & Related Companies

The web development corporation Automatic owns WordPress.com. The parent company of WordPress currently employs 490 people. The company that produces WordPress themes and plugins is the Australian-based Envato. Envato has 180 employees and 80 contractors working from different parts of the world. The hosted service provider for WordPress-based pages is called WPEngine. WPEngine is known for raising $40.712 million from 9 investors during just five years.

Security Issues

WordPress has been known to suffer from many security breaches. Out of all CMS-based websites that were targets of hackers in 2016, 78% were powered by WordPress. In 2011, an attack on WordPress compromised 18 million of its users. Three years later, WordPress was forced to reset approximately 100,000 passwords to protect its users after the infamous leak of 5 million Google accounts. WordPress blogs were implicated in the Panama Papers Breach when 2.6 TB of data and 11.5 million sensitive documents were stolen and leaked online.

Famous WordPress Clients

There are popular websites, newspapers, blogs, global brands and even celebrities that use WordPress.The list of important customers of WordPress news agency Reuters, The Wall Street Journal, Forbes magazine, The New York Times, and Harvard Business Review. Modern tech blogs the likes of Mashable, BoingBoing, Digg, TechCrunch, and IGN are also WordPress-based. Just some of the famous brands that use WordPress are Coca-Cola, Samsung, Star Wars franchise, PlayStation, and Mercedes-Benz, while top celebrity users of WordPress include Jay-Z, Russell Brand, Sir Tom Jones, Kobe Bryant, and Sylvester Stallone.

Visualizing WordPress in 28 Facts

For more surprising facts about WordPress, take a look at the infographic below:


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