You would be shocked at how difficult is it to come up with a simple number to answer the question “how many sites run WordPress”.
To answer the question, you first have to define the parameters. What is a “site”? This is not an easy one either.
For example, if I make a blog, and post on it for a while, and it gets visitors, but then I stop posting on it, and people stop visiting it… does it still exist? Is it still a “site”? A WordPress website only does anything when somebody looks at it, so when does it stop counting as a site?
Even then, does a site count only when it has its own domain, or is example.com/blog also a site to be counted?
And yes, most WP sites check for updates so we can count those, but they don’t all check every day, they only check when they’re actively being used, so we would need to keep track of them over time and so on.. It’s a darned tricky question when you get right down to it.
The answer is likely between the tens of millions and the hundreds of millions range, depending on how you define the question properly. It’s easier to think of things in terms of percentages. This is what we generally use.
W3Techs places WordPress as running 40% of the websites. They describe their methodology over there too:
https://w3techs.com/blog/entry/40_percent_of_the_web_uses_wordpress
Thanks! Yes that helps tease apart some assumptions in my initial question. Clearly it’s a complex issue.
W3Techs again groups all wordpress sites(?) under one umbrella AFAICS, rather than distinguishing self hosted vs centrally hosted. It seems to say that wordpress.com is not even the largest wordpress host, which raises other interesting questions about how to define “self hosted”.
Are there statistics for how many sites are hosted on wordpress.com, at least? That would be help separate one of the largest non-self-hosted groups from the big aggregated numbers.
You would need to ask them directly for that information, we don’t run WordPress.com from here. 🙂
