WordPress powers 14.7 per cent of the top million web sites

According to WordPress founder and lead developer Matt Mullenweg, 14.7 per cent of the top million web sites in the world are now powered by the open source blogging and publishing platform, up from just 8.5 per cent a year ago. The project's latest data also shows that 22 out of every 100 new active domains in the United States are running WordPress.

Map of global respondents to the WordPress's first user and developer survey
Source: WordPress Speaking at WordCamp, the project's official annual conference which took place in San Francisco last week, Mullenweg provided "a few interesting tidbits" from the first ever user and developer survey, in which the project received more than 18,000 responses from across the globe. According to the survey data, more than 170,000 WordPress sites were built by 6,800 self-employed respondents that charged a median hourly rate of $50. Mullenweg said that, when asked "What's the best thing about WordPress?", the number one response from developers was "ease of use", with 20 per cent of users saying the same thing; the second most popular response was the supportive community.

The number one complaint, however, was related to plug-ins, including security holes, bugs and upgrade problems faced by users. There are now 15,000 plug-ins available for WordPress and there have been more than 200 million plug-in downloads to date. To help the community avoid out of date or broken plug-ins, in future, if a plug-in or theme hasn't been updated in two years, it will be hidden from the search results both on WordPress.org and the user Dashboard, added Mullenweg.

More details about the survey data, including a video of Mullenweg giving his State of the Word address at WordCamp, can be found in a post on the WordPress blog. The anonymised survey data is available to download (direct download) as a 9 MB CSV file. WordPress is licensed under version 2 of the GNU General Public License (GPLv2).

See also:

• WordPress 3.2 brings Zen editing to blogging, a report from The H.
• WordPress replaces more than a million Microsoft Live Spaces blogs, a report from The H.
• WordPress to replace Microsoft Live Spaces blogging, a report from The H.

(crve)