Matt Mullenweg of Automattic, WordPress.com, the self-hosted version of WordPress, was featured today on the Wall Street Journal Business talking about the fact that WordPress now supports 14% of all websites in the world, approximately 1 in 6 globally.
Click to view video on Wall Street Journal site.
Matt talked about the future of WordPress and made these three points.
- WordPress as a CMS: More and more companies, traditional, and virtual publishers are choosing WordPress for their long time Content Management System.
- Social Blogging: With the great popularity and rise of the use of social media like Facebook and Twitter, blogging has become even more popular than ever, fueled by the social web. “You look at all those posts on Facebook and Twitter and most of them are pointing to blog posts,” explained Matt.
- Mobile and Touch: The mobility of our computer experience is growing internationally at a phenomenal pace, and WordPress will be improving to support the touch and mobile environment for speed and easier usage, as well as expanding their reach globally.
Matt mentioned that WordPress is now available in 53 languages. In my own research on WordPress stats, WordPress is published in more than 120 languages (including Esperanto), though the full interface has only been developed in approximately 60 languages. The international WordPress Polyglots group is constantly seeking translators and localization specialists to expand the translation of the interface of WordPress.
My own research also showed that 25% of all websites are published with WordPress, though this is based upon the statistic that more than half of these are on WordPress.com, where people come and go and set up test sites on a regular basis and abandon them, so Matt’s number may represent a more accurate number of active sites.
The Wall Street Journal’s Speakeasy and other WSJ properties are now on WordPress, along with 15% of the top million websites in the world, proof that more and more enterprise and corporate businesses are seeing the value in choosing WordPress.
Matt Mullenweg and Toni Schneider were interviewed by Forbes in September talking about the impact of 60 million websites running WordPress. They also covered how WordPress makes money and why there is not WordPress “office” for their employees scattered around the world.
Congrats to Matt and the entire WordPress Community for such recognition by the major media forces. It is well deserved, and exciting as WordPress approaches its 10th anniversary next year.
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7 Comments
Hi Lorelle! Noticed this post at the top of the WP news when I logged into my WP blog. Nice placement!
LOL! I have no control over that. It is first come first serve on the WordPress Planet. Just timing, but glad you noticed. Thanks!
Wow..That’s amazing. Hats off to all the wordpress team!
I think Matt do good things, and his will and business strategy is a masterpiece.
Appreciate you sharing the news and backing it up with evidence, Lorelle.
It’s amazing to me that I still run into people who think that if you don’t hand-code everything, you must not be a “real” web designer.
That’s great news for WordPress. However, the sad reality for most (non-tech) people who want to create a web business with WordPress is that they need to adhere to an easy-to-follow, all-in-one, proven, ethical webbusiness-building system (not a get rich quick scheme) to get (1) a significant amount of traffic and get (2) targeted traffic. Otherwise you’ll end up having (and building) only a WordPress webSITE but not a webBUSINESS.
This is true for wherever someone sets up shop online, be it WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, Facebook, Twitter, etc. This is a business practice that has nothing to do with WordPress as a web-publishing entity.
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