20 reasons why people still love WordPress

With all the drama surrounding WordPress (more specifically, Matt Mullenweg) this past year, you’d think there’d have been a mass migration from the world’s most popular content management system. 

But that’s the interesting part. What this whole circus has shown us is that people don’t have a problem with WordPress. The issue is with Mullenweg, the chaos swirling around him, and the fear that it’ll trickle over to everyone’s websites and businesses at some point. 

While there are some people considering alternative options in light of the WordPress vs. WP Engine showdown, many aren’t. Even with its flaws, WordPress’s reputation as the best CMS endures. 

So, let’s cut Mullenweg out of the picture for the moment. Instead, let’s reflect on WordPress’s legacy, strengths, and the reason why so many people want to save it even with all the messiness going on around it. 

WordPress began in 2003 as a fork of the b2/cafelog blogging platform. It has come a long way since then.

Here are 20 facts and statistics about WordPress that demonstrate why this CMS has staying power:

Under WordPress’s GPL license, you have the freedom to: 

1. Use the software for any reason.
2. Make alterations to how WordPress works so it fits your needs.
3. Redistribute the software as you wish.
4. Share the altered version of WordPress with other people. 

(Source: WordPress)

WordPress is the most versatile and powerful CMS, enabling people to use it for many different purposes. In 2023, people used WordPress for the following reasons: 

• To launch personal and passion projects (55.1%)
• As a service offering for clients (48.8%)
• To provide a platform for their own business (43.1%)
• To build a website for an employer (36.7%)
• Academic purposes (13.7%)
• Something else (8.1%)

(Source: Report for 2023 WordPress Annual Survey)

If we look at all of the websites that exist at the moment, WordPress powers 43.6% of them. If we look solely at the number of websites with known CMS, that percentage jumps to 62.0%.

The next closest CMS is Shopify with 4.7% of the total web market share.

(Source: W3Techs)

As of 2025, 34,342,409 live websites are built on WordPress. If we look at all the websites ever known to be built with WordPress, the total goes up to 66,583,563.

(Source: BuiltWith)

You can use WordPress in more than 70 languages. U.S. English is the most commonly used with 43.38%. Other popular languages and locales include: 

• Spanish (Spain): 5.87%
• Japanese: 5.82%
• German: 5.51%
• French (France): 4.55%
• Portuguese (Brazil): 3.73%
• English (UK): 3.42%
• Italian: 3.19%

(Source: WordPress)

WordPress is the #1 platform in key categories like: 

• Content management systems
• Open source
• Blogging

For instance, out of the 40 million websites that use open source technologies, 91% use WordPress (if you combine it with WooCommerce Checkout).

(Source: BuiltWith)

WordPress ranks as the #1 open source CMS in the U.S., UK, the Netherlands, Russia, Indonesia, and Germany. 

(Source: BuiltWith)

WordPress is the most popular website builder solution for the top websites around the world. 

• Of the top 1 million, 23.23% are on WordPress.
• Of the top 100,000, 26.19% are on WordPress.
• Of the top 10,000, 25.25% are on WordPress.

(Source: BuiltWith)

63.3% of WordPress users agree that it’s better than any other site builder or CMS on the market. Why? These are the top reasons:  

• Needs fulfillment (58.4%)
• Open source (56.6%)
• Familiarity (52.0%)
• Well-established (49.4%)
• Cost-effectiveness (49.1%)
• Community and support (44.0%)
• Positive reputation (37.5%)

(Source: Report for 2023 WordPress Annual Survey)

Websites that generate millions and billions of dollars a year choose WordPress over other content management systems. For example: 

• creativecommons.org makes over $2M
• outbrain.com makes over $82M
• bloomberg.com makes over $100M
• kohls.com makes over $1B
• salesforce.com makes over $2B

Other top-ranking sites that use WordPress include microsoft.com, digicert.com, nih.gov, ebay.com, and creditkarma.com.

(Source: BuiltWith)

Enterprise users tend to stay with WordPress over the long term, with 75% using the CMS for 5 years or more. 

22% of enterprises have used WordPress between 2 and 5 years while only 2% have used it for less time.

(Source: State of Enterprise WordPress 2024 Report)

WordPress isn’t some open-source platform that only super tech-savvy users like web developers can use. Enterprise users agree that it effectively enables large-scale collaboration. 

• 41% have 50 or more employees that use it
• 12% have between 20 and 49 employees using it
• 28% have between 5 and 19
• 19% have fewer than 5

(Source: State of Enterprise WordPress 2024 Report)

One of the reasons why WordPress is so popular is its extensibility, thanks to a massive plugin repository. 

On wordpress.org, there are currently over 59,000 free or freemium plugins. CodeCanyon has more than 5,200 premium plugins. 

(Sources: WordPress, CodeCanyon)

The WordPress community has done a fantastic job in making WordPress plugins to fulfill every need. The most popular (free) plugins have amassed tens of millions of installations between them. These include: 

• Elementor: 10M
• Contact Form 7: 10M
• Yoast SEO: 10M
• Classic Editor: 10M
• WooCommerce: 8M

(Source: WordPress)

More than 18 million websites have been built with Elementor and Elementor Pro. More than a quarter of all WordPress websites (26.8%) use Elementor. 

(Source: Elementor, W3Techs)

On wordpress.org, there are currently over 13,000 free or freemium themes. ThemeForest has almost 12,000 premium themes (including Avada, which recently sailed past a mind-blowing one million downloads):

#Avada celebrates 1,000,000 sales on Themeforest, a milestone of epic proportions & world-class achievements https://t.co/TRoqm7EVrf @envato#HappyNewYear2025 to the #Avada community; thank you for another wonderful year! Stay tuned for what comes next – #HappyNewYear #WordPress pic.twitter.com/2A7Q9x4nOP

— ThemeFusion (@Theme_Fusion) December 31, 2024

The beautiful thing about having such a vast array of WordPress themes available is you don’t have to worry about every website you build looking the same as everyone else’s. 

Case in point, these are the most popular WordPress themes used by the top 1 million websites: 

• Hello Elementor: 1.68% of websites
• Astra Theme: 1.2%
• Divi: 1.11%
• GeneratePress: 0.83%
• Newspaper: 0.53%
• Avada: 0.47%
• Genesis Framework: 0.39%
• Flatsome: 0.32%
• Twenty Seventeen: 0.3%
• Kadence: 0.3%

With a small percentage of sites using the same themes, WordPress makes it easy to create truly unique designs.

(Sources: WordPress, ThemeForest, BuiltWith)

37% of enterprise WordPress users rated WordPress a “good return on investment” while 35% rated it an “excellent return on investment”. This is in relation to revenue generation, time saved, and/or resource efficiency.

(Source: State of Enterprise WordPress 2024 Report)

Matt Mullenweg might steal most of the headlines, but there are so many amazingly talented people working behind the scenes to make WordPress the best CMS out there. In fact, there are 24 teams of contributors devoted to the cause: 

WordCamps are local conferences where WordPress users of all types come together to learn, share ideas, and network. 

Mullenweg launched the first WordCamp back in 2006 in San Francisco. To date, there have been 1,286 WordCamps. They’ve been hosted in 406 cities, 65 countries, and on 6 continents.

(Source: WordCamp Central)

Meetups are a great way to meet other WordPress users and to build WordPress communities on a local level. Currently, there are 517,599 Meetup members, 641 WordPress groups, and 93 countries where these meetups take place. 

(Source: Meetup)

When Matt Mullenweg went to Reddit at the end of 2024 to ask WordPress users “What drama should I create in 2025?”, it was clear where their frustrations lie. (Hint: It wasn’t with the platform.)

Since its founding in 2003, WordPress has slowly and steadily won over web pros, business owners, marketers, bloggers, shop owners, self-starters, and others. No matter how much chaos follows its co-founder around, users aren’t eager to leave WordPress behind. 

The WordPress facts and statistics above show us why that’s the case. WordPress gives its users a huge amount of freedom, flexibility, and power to build anything they can imagine. There’s nothing else on the market that can compare.