Once in awhile, we have internal discussions amongst our team about WordPress and its place in the current market. Conversations revolve around whether or not we should expand our offerings to other types of content management systems (CMS) and asking the big “what if” question of what happens if another platform comes along to take the place of WordPress in the current market. As always, we double down on our commitment to the WordPress platform as the best CMS available today, and we’re not the only ones. At the time of this writing, WordPress has passed 40% market share for all websites
“WordPress is used by 64.5% of all the websites whose content management system we know. This is 40.6% of all websites,” reports W3Techs, who tracks these numbers from several sources, including Alexa’s top ten million and Tranco’s top million websites. Every year, we see the market share for WordPress surpass the year before, and that gives us the validation of what we already know: WordPress is the best CMS available on the web today.
WebDevStudios has been a proud part of the WordPress ecosystem for the past 13 years as a company. In the beginning, we made the strategic decision to focus strongly on the WordPress platform for building websites for our diverse range of clients, and it was clearly one of the best business decisions we made back then.
Year after year, we continue our commitment, as evidenced by the books that Brad Williams (our CEO) and I write on WordPress, our ongoing dedication to our Five For The Future pledge, as well as confidently steering our clients in the direction of the number-one platform as a solution to their content management and website requirements.
In terms of cost, there just is no beating the cost of WordPress. As a platform, it’s free to use. Yes, there are costs associated with running a website, like the cost of hosting, for example, but the platform itself is free.
There is not just one feature, in particular, that makes us point to WordPress as the top CMS, rather all of its features put together make it the perfect tool. The recent addition of the Block Editor (Gutenberg) to the platform has really created a beautiful way for writers and editors to manage and maintain content, while not being required to understand technologies like HTML and CSS, in order to make it happen.
I, personally, like WordPress as a platform solution because of its flexibility and extensibility. The plugin engine really allows us to be super flexible in what types of solutions we craft, which makes WordPress the perfect solution to any technical challenge our clients bring our way. We can use any of thousands of existing plugins built for WordPress, or create custom plugins of our own (or a combination of the two!) to craft websites that meet any requirement, while still keeping strong security and coding standards in place. Combine that with a robust API and ability to connect a multitude of microservices, like MailChimp, for example. It is much easier and most cost-efficient to utilize the MailChimp API to connect it to WordPress for email newsletter needs than it is to build a custom email newsletter service for marketing purposes.
At WebDevStudios, we have built so many different and creative types of projects with WordPress, each one different and unique in their own way. We use WordPress to build eCommerce platforms for clients that enable them to integrate their product and service offerings, allow payment transactions and account management on the same website and domain as the one they use for their sales and marketing content offerings. We’ve also used WordPress as a web app to build out very complex applications that rely heavily on the custom post type, custom taxonomy, and custom field features available in the platform. The flexibility is what really attracts agencies like us when it comes to crafting reliable, secure, and performant solutions.
Very recently, we have been focusing on using WordPress as a “Headless CMS.” A Headless CMS acts as a bridge between your main website platform and your library of content, such as blog posts, static text, and media. WordPress is already the world’s most popular CMS, making it an easy, go-to solution when you find yourself in need of a Headless CMS. It’s important to talk about a headless option with clients, particularly ones who prioritize speed, security and performance for their project.
CMS refers to the application in which you store and manage website content. Traditionally, that meant using a monolithic system such as WordPress, Drupal, or Joomla. They’re called “monolithic” because their architecture involves several layers, including the backend (database), functional (plugins), and presentational (themes) layer. These layers can all work harmoniously together in a single interface such as a dashboard.
The rise in popularity of microservices and JavaScript frameworks such as React, along with WordPress’s REST-API meant developers could decouple the presentational layer (theme) and build a frontend without having to worry about interrupting the workflow of content editors.
-From Headless WordPress and Headless CMS, by Greg Rickaby, Director of Engineering
Clients in all industries benefit from the flexibility, ease of use, extensibility, and cost of the WordPress platform. We have seen first hand how it has made a difference for our clients in a variety of industry verticals, such as consumer packaged goods, technology, travel, education, nonprofits, and more. The fact that WordPress is open-source software with such a large and passionate community of developers is also a big plus because it is being constantly iterated on, improved, future-proofed, and secured by the web’s most talented development community.
At WebDevStudios, we are not surprised that WordPress has passed the 40% market share mark for all websites on the web. It is a joy to tell our clients, and really anyone who will listen, that WordPress powers more than 40% of the web. We are proud to play even a small part of that success by contributing, committing ourselves, and consistently pointing to WordPress as the solution for clients who approach us to craft their presence on the web.
I fully expect this time next year, we’ll be talking about WordPress surpassing 50% market share and beyond. Do you need a team who knows WordPress and has focused all of their skills, talents, and experience toward crafting amazing WordPress solutions? Don’t be afraid to reach out to us. We are more than happy to talk with you!
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