It is believed that 30 to 40% of all websites in the world are built on WordPress, and I am one of those who have spread this claim. Recently, I came across similar statistics again and decided to verify their accuracy. Collecting and analyzing data from open sources is one of my strengths, so without much hesitation, I began gathering data for a detailed examination of this claim.
As a basis, I took Estonian domains in the .ee zone.
167,576 websites were analyzed. Of these, 133,108 had a status code of 200, and among these sites, 42,525 were identified as built on WordPress.
Thus, it turns out that roughly 32% of functioning domains are WordPress sites.
As for the 34,468 domains, I do not take them into account because half of them are non-working domains, some have redirects, and access is denied to others.
More details are as follows:
- 2XX — 133,114
- 3XX — 22
- 4XX — 12,918
- 5XX — 2,532
- unavailable — 18,990
So essentially, the claim that a third of the internet is built on WordPress is true. However, the quality of these sites leaves much to be desired.
Since WordPress is a popular open source platform, anyone can install it either through quick installations from hosting providers or manually using the many instructions available online. This greatly affects the quality of these sites. I won’t dilute the statistics here; the current goal was not to determine whether these sites are abandoned or not. But I will say that nearly 1,000 sites had the standard header like “Just another WordPress Site.”
If you look for people associated with WordPress in Estonia itself, you will find 3,400 specialists, with only 32 people working as WordPress developers.
In general, there is work and there is competition. Each specialist with WordPress skills has an optimistic 12.5 sites.
Why optimistic?
Because some of the 42,525 WordPress sites are abandoned, some are maintained by the owners themselves, as WordPress strives each year to make site management accessible to everyone. And starting with version 6.5, the possibility of no-coding development has only become more accessible.
In a separate post, I will detail the statistics on hosting choices for this domain zone.
In conclusion:
From the above, I conclude that the claim is indeed true, but the quality of 30 percent of the internet is questionable to me.
Nowadays, everyone has the opportunity to own a website, but not everyone has one that is up and running. The statistics of the entire internet are somewhat “inflated.”
What do you think about these calculations? And if you want data on other countries you are interested in, write in the comments.
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