W3Techs: Thirty percent of ten million most popular websites run WordPress

W3Techs, which researches and tracks the use of certain web technologies, states in its latest content management system statistics that 30 percent of the 10 million most popular websites run on WordPress.

The use of WordPress has not suddenly increased very fast, but recently reached the milestone of thirty percent, W3Techs shows on its cms page. This leaves it far behind other CMS products, such as Joomla with 3.1 percent and Drupal with 2.2 percent. This is followed by Magento, Shopify and Blogger. The growth of WordPress has been steady, according to W3Techs data, with the system reaching a share of 25 percent at the end of 2015.

That percentage takes into account all pages in the Alexa top of the ten million most popular websites, which W3Techs holds for its surveys. However, some of those websites don’t use cms that is counted by the organization at all. If we look at the share among websites that do use a tracked CMS, the share of WordPress comes out at 60 percent.

The shares of Joomla, Drupal and other systems also double, in this case 6.3 and 4.4 percent respectively. W3Techs stats do not show distribution in WordPress versions. Version 4.9.3 introduced a bug in the software that disabled automatic updates and therefore requires a manual update for a patch.

The open source software came out in 2003. The next major release is version 5.0, which should be released sometime this year.