WordPress Powers Half The Top 10,000 Sites Online

[vangogh]

I thought these charts, which I found via WPTavern on CMS distribution among the most visited sites online interesting.

Top 10,000
WordPress: 47.87%
Drupal: 23.33%
vBulletin: 9.35%

When expanded to the top 100,000 and top 1,000,000, WordPress usage goes up to 56.95% and 69.82%

These stats are collected every week I think so the numbers will probably be different next week, though I wouldn't expect them to change significantly week over week.

Mouse over the pies in the chart to see the %. Also if you're not sure what CMS to use, the chart will point you to a number of popular ones.

[kerrylinux]

What puzzles me is the fact that Movable Type has such an insignificant usage lower than 2 percent, because I thought the idea of compiling a site to speed up performance would appeal to a lager number of top sites.

[vangogh]

Movable Type dropped the ball years ago when WordPress was first coming on the scene. At the same time WordPress was being offered for free Movable Type was raising prices and restricting its license. They had been the overwhelming market leader at the time for anyone wanting a blog. I think today few people know they exist.

It looks like they've changed their business model since then and now have something similar to WordPress with a free platform on the .org side and a commercial offering on the .com side. It may be too little, too late though. It's going to take a lot of effort at this point to unseat WordPress.

[AllCeasonsDesign]

Well I feel quite uninformed here, but what is WordPress? I looked it up on Wikipedia and did not understand a word of what they said. Is this a tool for building web sites or for blogs only? Or is it more of a place where blogs are stored? If it is a tool for building web sites, why would it be superior to straight html? Sorry, if this is an elementary question.

[vangogh]

WordPress is a content management system (CMS). Originally it was mostly focused on blogging only, but over the years it has become a full content management system. You can create a complete website with it and not just a blog.

The main advantages of any CMS over html is ease of use and maintainability. If you develop a website for a client and your client wants to update some content on the page they likely have to call you to make the change, since they probably won't feel comfortable editing html files. With a content management system the client just logs in to their site and edits the page much as they would a Word document.

A CMS is more maintainable because the content (and some other things) are stored in a database instead of being embedded directly in files. Imagine you have a site that has 150 pages. Not a huge site, but not a small one either. Now imagine the client wants it redesigned. If it's coded in html you're going to be copying and pasting a lot of content to the new files and that's going to take time, effort, and be prone to errors.

You can reduce the work and errors by building the site where the presentation (css) is separate from the structure (html). You can further reduce both by using a server side scripting language like php so code that repeats across the site (maybe a consistent header on every page) is moved to a single file and then included on each page with a single line of code. The next step up is turning a php/css/html site into a CMS. Each step abstracts a little more how the site is built. That abstraction makes the site more flexible and easier to maintain.

Probably more of an answer than you were looking for, but hopefully something in there helps. The best way to understand WordPress (or any CMS), is to get a copy and install it and start using it.

[KristineS]

Wow, TypePad isn't on there at all, or is that Moveable Type? I still see a few blogs using Typepad, but not that many.

[vangogh]

TypePad is different than MovableType, though it's based on Movable Type. Both are from the same company.

I think what these charts are showing is how quickly WordPress has grown into the dominant platform for building websites. I think Matt Mullenweg recently said WordPress is now behind 16% of all sites online. That means that for ever 6.something sites online 1 of them is running on WordPress. That's a lot of WordPress sites. And when you look over the charts I linked to above, you see that the more visited a site is, the more likely it's running WordPress.

None of that is to say your site should be running WordPress of course. There are plenty of platforms you can use and many of them are very good. Still it's a credit to what WordPress has been able to achieve in about 8 years.

[jamestl2]

Are the "top 10,000 sites" based off traffic numbers? Or amount of content?

Also, are these "top sites" just sites that run off of the listed CMS's? Because I imagine the very large top sites like Google, Facebook, etc. run off of their own software.

[vangogh]

It's based on traffic. I'm sure it's not 100% accurate, but I would think it's pretty good. The data is coming from Quantcast. The link should take you to their top million sites list.

I'd agree that Google and Facebook use their own software, but remember that's only 2 sites. I'm sure the top 100 or even 500 sites are not going to show a lot of WordPress usage, but as you move toward the back end of the top 10,000 I think you'll find more and more WordPress sites.

[kerrylinux]

But then, what is the secret behind WordPress' success?

When I became aware of MovableType I thought is was a clever idea to build the whole website (a blog) in static HTML in advance as opposed to the way WordPress does handle the page creation (pulling all data from a (slow) database) because obviously static HTML is much faster than database driven content that has to be assembled via a scripting language like PHP. Although all content is actually stored in a database, there is a process called "publishing" in which every page is been assembled and stored in plain HTML. This must be an advantage for those sites in particular who have to cope with a large amount of traffic.

If on the other hand WordPress has become the quasi standard, what is the secret of it's success (beyond being more than a blog platform)?