WordPress Statistics 2026: What the Numbers Actually Tell You

Sebastian Hartwell
7 minutes ago
10 min read

WordPress powers 42.5% of all websites globally as of April 2026, making it the most widely used content management system by a significant margin. These wordpress statistics cover market share, active site counts, growth trends, themes, plugins, WooCommerce, security, and community data all sourced and clearly explained.

WordPress at a Glance

WordPress powers 42.5% of all websites globally
59.9% CMS market share — more than all other platforms combined
Between 37.5 million (active sites) and 605 million (all hostnames) web properties run WordPress
Over 61,000 free plugins in the WordPress.org directory
Nearly 14,000 free themes available on WordPress.org
WooCommerce holds 33.43% of the global eCommerce market
WordPress has been translated into 208 languages
53 major releases since version 1.0 in 2003
WordPress sites face an attack on average every 32 minutes
Over 1,300 WordCamp events held across 70+ countries

What Percentage of Websites Use WordPress in 2026?

As of April 2026, WordPress is installed on 42.5% of all websites globally, according to W3Techs the most widely cited source for CMS adoption data. That figure covers the entire web, not just sites using a content management system. It includes blogs, business sites, news outlets, online stores, and enterprise platforms.

To put it plainly: roughly four in every ten websites you visit runs on WordPress. The next closest platform is Shopify at 5.1%. That's not a narrow gap WordPress has nearly nine times the reach of its nearest rival.

What's often overlooked is that W3Techs measures what it calls "the relevant web" sites with actual content and real traffic. Parked domains and empty pages are excluded. So the 42.5% figure reflects functioning websites, not ghost domains.

How Does WordPress Compare to Other CMS Platforms?

Platform	Share of All Websites	Share of CMS Market
WordPress	42.5%	59.9%
Shopify	5.1%	7.2%
Wix	4.3%	6.0%
Squarespace	2.5%	3.5%
Joomla	1.3%	1.8%
Webflow	0.9%	1.2%
Drupal	0.7%	1.0%
No CMS	28.8%	—

Among sites using a known CMS, WordPress holds 59.9% more than all other platforms added together. Shopify, its nearest CMS rival, holds just 7.2%. That's not dominance in the typical sense. It's a different category entirely.

Interestingly, even among the top 10,000 websites by traffic, WordPress accounts for roughly 58% of CMS usage. Wix and Shopify are nearly absent at that level. Drupal, despite holding just 1% overall, accounts for 6–7% among large institutional sites reflecting its historical foothold in government and higher education.

How Many Websites Actually Use WordPress?

This is where the numbers get complicated and where most articles either pick one figure without context or leave readers more confused than when they started.The honest answer: it depends entirely on what you mean by "website."

605 million — This is the upper estimate, derived by applying WordPress's 42.5% share to NetCraft's February 2026 count of 1.42 billion hostnames. The problem is that NetCraft counts everything: parked domains, staging environments, test installations, and sites with zero active content.
37.5 million — This is BuiltWith's count of live, actively visited WordPress properties. A much more conservative and arguably more useful number.

The real count of functioning WordPress websites sits somewhere between those two figures. Neither is wrong. They're measuring different things.

Active Sites vs. Total Web Properties — Why the Numbers Differ

Think of it this way. NetCraft counts every address on the internet, including abandoned buildings. BuiltWith counts the ones with the lights on.For most practical purposes whether you're a developer, marketer, or business owner the 37.5 million active sites figure is the more relevant one.

The 605 million number gives a sense of WordPress's theoretical footprint across the entire web infrastructure.In practice, teams researching WordPress adoption tend to use W3Techs for share percentages and BuiltWith for active site estimates. Both are legitimate approaches to different questions.

WordPress Market Share Growth — Year by Year

WordPress has more than tripled its market share over the past 15 years. In 2011 it powered 13.1% of all websites. By April 2026 that figure stands at 42.5%. The growth trajectory is consistent, though it has clearly flattened since 2022.

Year	WordPress % of All Websites
2011	13.1%
2012	15.8%
2013	17.4%
2014	21.0%
2015	23.3%
2016	25.6%
2017	27.3%
2018	29.2%
2019	32.7%
2020	35.4%
2021	39.5%
2022	43.2%
2023	43.1%
2024	43.5%
2025	43.4%
2026	42.5%

Figures reflect January 1 of each year except 2026 (April 1).2021 was a meaningful milestone. That was the first year WordPress became more common than "no CMS" meaning.WordPress-powered sites outnumbered hand-coded or custom-built sites for the first time in web history.

What Is Driving the Slowdown in WordPress Growth?

The slight dip to 42.5% in early 2026 is the first notable decline after years of steady growth. The HTTP Archive's 2025 Web Almanac describes this as WordPress shifting from expansion to stabilisation, a sign of a maturing platform reaching near-saturation in its addressable market.

At first glance this seems alarming. But context matters. The web itself has grown significantly. WordPress isn't shrinking it's holding an enormous share of a much larger pie.The competitive picture has shifted too. Shopify grew from 0.1% in 2014 to 5.1% today.

Wix followed a similar path to 4.3%. Both platforms attracted users primarily first-time site builders and eCommerce merchants who might not have turned to WordPress anyway.Meanwhile, Joomla and Drupal, the two platforms most comparable to WordPress, roughly halved their share during the same period.

What also changed: the share of websites using no CMS at all dropped from 68.2% in 2013 to 28.6% in 2026. The web moved decisively toward content management systems. WordPress captured the majority of that shift.

WordPress Usage by Country

The United States leads WordPress adoption by a wide margin, with an estimated 16.5 million WordPress websites. Germany and the United Kingdom follow, each with between 1.4 and 1.9 million sites.

Country	Estimated WordPress Sites
United States	16.5 million
Germany	1.8–1.9 million
United Kingdom	1.4–1.6 million
Brazil	~1.2 million
France	~1.0 million
Italy	~0.9 million
Netherlands	~0.8 million
India	~0.7 million
Spain	~0.7 million
Russia	~0.6 million

Japan stands out as an unusually strong WordPress market. According to the State of the Word 2024, WordPress powers 58.5% of all Japanese websites and holds an 83% CMS market share in the country well above the global average on both counts.

Google Trends data shows high relative search interest in WordPress from Pakistan, China, Bangladesh, Bosnia & Herzegovina, and Kenya pointing to meaningful adoption growth in emerging markets. WordPress has been translated into 208 languages, and non-English installations now outnumber English ones.

WordPress.com vs. WordPress.org — What the Statistics Actually Measure

This distinction matters more than most statistics articles acknowledge. Every market share figure in this article the 42.5%, the 59.9%, the BuiltWith site counts refers to the WordPress software, distributed freely through WordPress.org. This is the self-hosted, open-source version that anyone can download and install on their own server.

WordPress.com is a separate hosted service run by Automattic. It uses the WordPress software but operates as a commercial platform with its own pricing tiers, restrictions, and user base.

When you read that WordPress powers 42.5% of the web, that is not a WordPress.com statistic.

It reflects the combined installed base of the WordPress software across millions of independently hosted websites worldwide. WordPress.com contributes to that count, but it is only one slice of a much larger picture.

WordPress Version and Technical Statistics

Around 88% of WordPress sites currently run version 6.x, reflecting reasonably healthy update adoption across the ecosystem. That said, approximately 12% of sites still run version 5.x or older and some of those versions no longer receive security patches.

WordPress Themes — How Many Are There?

The WordPress.org theme directory contains nearly 14,000 free themes as of April 2026. ThemeForest, the largest third-party marketplace, adds another 12,000+ paid options. Factor in independent theme shops and niche providers, and the total number of available WordPress themes comfortably exceeds 30,000.

A notable trend: block-based themes built specifically for the WordPress block editor crossed 1,000 available options on WordPress.org in October 2024. That's a relatively recent milestone and reflects a genuine shift in how themes are being built.

Most Popular WordPress Themes

Among the top 1 million websites tracked by BuiltWith, the leading themes by usage are:

Theme	Sites (Top 1M)	Market Share
Hello Elementor	22,658	12.9%
Astra	14,480	7.73%
GeneratePress	11,675	6.23%
Divi	11,366	6.07%
Flatsome	5,643	3.01%

On ThemeForest (Envato Market), the all-time best-selling themes are Avada (1.054 million sales), The7 (333K), BeTheme (332K), Enfold (269K), and Flatsome (265K). The pattern across both lists points toward multipurpose themes designed to work alongside page builders.

How Much Do WordPress Themes Cost?

Free themes are widely available and genuinely functional this isn't a category where "free" means limited. That said, premium themes typically run between $10 and $200+, with an average price point around $59.

Theme membership subscriptions which give access to an entire library range from $48 to $399 per year, with the average around $145 annually. Lifetime memberships average approximately $255 as a one-time payment, which organisations managing multiple sites often find more cost-effective over time.

WordPress Plugins — How Many Are There?

There are over 61,000 free plugins in the WordPress Plugin Directory and more than 5,200 paid plugins on CodeCanyon alone. The broader ecosystem of independent developers, SaaS companies, niche marketplaces likely pushes the real total beyond 70,000.

The diversity of what these plugins cover is genuinely remarkable. SEO, eCommerce, forms, caching, security, analytics, membership, booking, multilingual support the plugin ecosystem is the primary reason WordPress can serve such a wide range of site types without modification to the core software.

Most Popular WordPress Plugins by Active Installations

Plugin Name	Active Installations
Elementor	10+ million
Yoast SEO	10+ million
Contact Form 7	10+ million
Classic Editor	9–10 million
WooCommerce	7–8 million
LiteSpeed Cache	7–8 million
Akismet	6–7 million
WPForms	6–7 million
All-in-One WP Migration	5–6 million
Site Kit by Google	5–6 million
Wordfence Security	5–6 million

WordPress Page Builder Usage

Approximately 59.9% of WordPress sites use a page builder of some kind. Among those sites, usage breaks down as follows:

Page Builder	Share of Builder Usage	Trend
Elementor	43%	Declining (was 56% in 2024)
WordPress Block Editor	18%	Growing
WPBakery	13%	Declining (was 21% in 2024)
Divi	10%	Declining (was 14% in 2024)
Beaver Builder	~2%	Stable

The shift toward the native Block Editor is gradual but consistent. Elementor remains the dominant third-party builder, though its share has dropped noticeably in a single year. Older builders like WPBakery and Divi are losing ground. This isn't surprising as the Block Editor matures, the case for adding a third-party layer becomes less compelling for new site builds.

WooCommerce and WordPress eComme

rce Statistics

WooCommerce holds 33.43% of the global eCommerce market more than any other platform. It runs as a plugin on top of WordPress, which means its reach is inseparable from WordPress's own growth story. According to data from Statista, WooCommerce has consistently ranked as the worldwide leading eCommerce software platform by market share.

eCommerce Platform	Market Share
WooCommerce	33.43%
Shopify	21.33%
Custom Cart	12.46%
Wix	7.53%

Shopify, often positioned as WooCommerce's main rival, holds 21.33% a significant share in its own right, and one that has grown steadily. But WooCommerce's advantage lies in its flexibility and the fact that it costs nothing to install.

For businesses already running WordPress, adding eCommerce capability without migrating platforms is a straightforward decision.Applying WooCommerce's 8.6% share of all websites to NetCraft's 1.42 billion hostname count produces an estimate of around 122 million WooCommerce installations.

That figure carries the same caveat as the WordPress total: many of those will be inactive or low-traffic. But it illustrates the scale of the platform's footprint.

WordPress Community and Ecosystem Statistics

WordPress is open-source software, which means its development, events, and much of its support infrastructure are community-driven. The numbers here reflect that.Since the first WordCamp in 2006, over 1,300 WordCamp events have been held across more than 70 countries.

These are locally organised conferences bringing together developers, designers, content creators, and business owners. They range from small regional meetups to multi-day events with hundreds of attendees.

In the most recent major release WordPress 6.6 38% of contributors were first-timers. That's a meaningful signal about the project's accessibility and continued ability to bring new people into the contributor base.

As reported by TechCrunch, around a thousand active core contributors engineer the WordPress product, while a much larger group of over 55,000 "extender" contributors builds the themes and plugins that expand the platform's functionality.

On the enterprise side, 61% of organisations surveyed in the State of Enterprise WordPress 2024 reported contributing to open-source WordPress projects up from 38% the prior year. That's a notable shift. It suggests enterprise users are moving beyond passive consumption toward active investment in the platform's future.

The commercial opportunity around WordPress remains substantial. Businesses looking to advertise on platforms like FeedBuzzard often find WordPress-based properties among the highest-traffic inventory available, given that WordPress powers the majority of content-driven websites globally.

Pantheon's original research (April 2025) estimates the traffic value of the top 2,000 WordPress-related keywords at $23.2 million per month, translating to an estimated $1.9–2.8 billion per year in commercial value using standard ROAS benchmarks.

WordPress Security Statistics

WordPress's size makes it a consistent target. Sites running WordPress face a security attack on average every 32 minutes, according to commonly cited security research. That sounds alarming, but it needs context: automated attacks sweep the entire web indiscriminately.

A WordPress site with current software, strong passwords, and basic security hygiene handles the vast majority of these without incident.The more concrete concern is version lag. Roughly 12% of WordPress sites still run version 5.x or older versions that no longer receive security patches in some cases.

Outdated plugins and themes compound the risk.Security teams working across large WordPress deployments commonly report that unpatched third-party plugins not WordPress core are the most frequent entry point for successful attacks.

Wordfence Security, one of the most widely used WordPress security plugins, has over 5 million active installations, which gives some indication of how seriously the user base takes this issue. For those evaluating broader platform risk, understanding how to invest wisely in site infrastructure is increasingly part of enterprise WordPress planning conversations.

Conclusion

WordPress holds 42.5% of the web, 59.9% of the CMS market, and powers the world's largest eCommerce plugin. Growth has slowed, but the platform's scale, ecosystem depth, and community strength remain unmatched by any comparable system in 2026.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is WordPress still growing in 2026?

Growth has stabilised. WordPress holds 42.5% of all websites — a slight dip from its 2024 peak of 43.5%. This reflects market saturation more than competitive pressure. The platform's share has plateaued, not declined sharply.

What is the difference between 42.5% and 59.9% market share?

42.5% is WordPress's share of all websites globally. 59.9% is its share only among websites using a known CMS. The difference accounts for the 28.8% of sites that run without any CMS.

How many people use WordPress?

WordPress does not track individual users. Site counts are the standard proxy. Active installations sit at approximately 37.5 million, though the total hostname count reaches an estimated 605 million.

Is WordPress losing ground to Shopify or Wix?

Not meaningfully. Shopify and Wix have grown, primarily by attracting new site creators rather than converting WordPress users. WordPress's share has plateaued — it hasn't reversed.

What is WooCommerce?

WooCommerce is a free, open-source eCommerce plugin built for WordPress. It holds 33.43% of the global eCommerce market — the largest share of any single platform.

WordPress Version	Estimated % of Sites
Version 6.x	~88.0%
Version 5.x	~8.6%
Version 4.x or older	~3.2%
Version 3.x	~0.3%