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WordPress Market Share: What the Numbers Mean for You
WordPress crossed 30% of all websites in March 2018, which is when we first published this post. As of August 2026, W3Techs puts it at 40.7% of all websites and 58.9% of sites that use a detectable CMS. The headline number still matters, but the more useful question for anyone choosing or maintaining a platform is what sits behind it: how it is measured, why it has plateaued, who is gaining, and what the size of the ecosystem actually buys you. This guide covers all four.
We have rewritten it as an evergreen reference rather than a news item. The figures below are from W3Techs unless stated otherwise, and we will keep them current.
Where the numbers come from
W3Techs surveys the top 10 million websites by traffic ranking and detects the technology on each one. It reports two figures for every CMS: the share of all websites (including those with no CMS at all) and the share of the CMS market (only sites where a CMS was detected). That is why you see both “40.7%” and “58.9%” quoted for WordPress; they are the same data read two ways.
The 2018 figure was built the same way, using Alexa rankings at the time. Alexa shut down in 2022 and W3Techs moved to other ranking sources, so comparisons across that boundary carry some noise. The trend is still clear.
Why HTTP Archive reports a lower number
HTTP Archive, which crawls URLs from the Chrome UX Report, puts WordPress nearer 33% to 35%. The gap is mostly methodology: W3Techs counts a domain once, HTTP Archive counts subdomains and individual pages separately, and the two sample different sets of sites. Neither is wrong. If a vendor quotes one without saying which, ask.
The market in August 2026
| Platform | Share of all websites | Share of CMS market | Model |
|---|---|---|---|
| WordPress | 40.7% | 58.9% | Open source, self-hosted or managed |
| Shopify | 5.3% | 7.7% | Closed SaaS, commerce-first |
| Wix | 4.2% | 6.1% | Closed SaaS builder |
| Squarespace | 2.4% | 3.5% | Closed SaaS builder |
| Joomla | 1.2% | 1.7% | Open source |
| Tilda | 0.8% | 1.2% | Closed SaaS builder |
Source: W3Techs, 21 August 2026. Drupal, which sat at 2.2% of all sites in 2018, has slipped under 1% as its user base consolidated around large enterprise and government installs.
Three things stand out. WordPress is still roughly eight times the size of the next platform. The platforms gaining share are all closed, hosted builders. And the open-source alternatives that competed with WordPress in 2018 (Joomla, Drupal) have lost more than half their share since.
Why growth stalled at around 43%
WordPress climbed steadily from 25% (November 2015) to 30% (March 2018) to a peak near 43% through 2022 and 2023, then drifted back to the low 40s. The plateau has a few causes, and none of them is “WordPress is dying”.
- The easy sites moved to builders. A restaurant or a freelancer who would have set up WordPress in 2015 now picks Wix or Squarespace because hosting, updates and security are somebody else’s problem. That segment was never WordPress’s strength.
- Commerce went to Shopify. Small and mid-size stores increasingly start on Shopify. WooCommerce still runs more stores in absolute numbers, but new-store growth favours the hosted option.
- The total web grew in ways that do not use a CMS. App landing pages built with frameworks, link-in-bio pages and static sites all count in the denominator.
- Governance noise. The public dispute between Automattic and WP Engine in late 2024 and 2025 made some agencies pause. Actual migrations away were small, but the hesitation showed up in new-site numbers.
In practice, 40% of the web on one platform, with the next competitor at 5%, is a dominant position whichever way you read it.
What market share actually buys you
Share is not a reason to choose a platform on its own. What the share produces is.
Plugins, themes and people
The wordpress.org directory holds roughly 60,000 free plugins and 13,000 free themes, plus a commercial ecosystem many times that size. More importantly, any problem you hit has been hit by someone else. Finding a developer who knows WordPress is easy in every country and every price bracket, which is not true of any other CMS.
Integrations by default
Every SaaS that offers a website integration ships a WordPress plugin first: payment gateways, CRMs, email platforms, analytics, booking systems. Shopify has a similar depth for commerce but not beyond it.
Longevity and portability
WordPress content lives in a standard MySQL database you can export at any time, and the GPL licence means no vendor can revoke your right to run the software. We move sites between hosts for clients every week; moving a site off Wix or Squarespace means rebuilding it. For a business asset that should last ten years, that portability is worth more than any single feature.
Ongoing platform investment
WordPress 7.0 “Armstrong” shipped on 20 May 2026 with real-time collaborative editing, a refreshed admin, a command palette and the Abilities API that exposes site capabilities to AI agents and external tools. A platform this size keeps attracting that kind of core work, and the 875+ contributors on 7.0 came from hosting companies, agencies and individuals rather than a single vendor.
Where WordPress is the wrong choice
Honesty cuts both ways. We steer clients elsewhere when:
- They want a five-page brochure site, have no technical help, and will never touch it again. A hosted builder is cheaper to own over three years.
- They run a pure product store with under 50 SKUs and no content strategy. Shopify’s checkout and fulfilment tooling is hard to beat out of the box.
- They need a headless content API for a mobile app only, with no web front end. WordPress can do this (the REST API and WPGraphQL are mature), but a purpose-built headless CMS may fit better.
WordPress earns its place when the site has content, community, courses, memberships or a store that needs to grow in directions you cannot predict yet. That covers most businesses, which is why the share is what it is.
How to use this data in a platform decision
- List the jobs the site must do in year one and year three. Blog, store, members area, course delivery, directory, events.
- Check which jobs have a mature WordPress ecosystem. For community sites, BuddyPress has been in active development since 2008 and a free theme such as BuddyX gets you a working social network in an afternoon. For courses, LearnDash, Tutor LMS and LifterLMS all run on WordPress and nowhere else.
- Price the ownership, not the licence. WordPress is free; hosting, premium plugins and maintenance are not. A realistic small-business budget is $30 to $100 a month for hosting plus $200 to $600 a year in plugin licences. Compare that with a builder’s plan plus app subscriptions at the same feature level.
- Decide who maintains it. Updates, backups and security are the hidden cost of self-hosting. Managed WordPress hosting or a maintenance plan closes most of that gap.
- Plan the exit. Whatever you pick, confirm you can export content in a usable format. With WordPress the answer is always yes.
A short example
A training company came to us in 2025 on a hosted builder. Year one needed a brochure site and a blog, which the builder handled. Year three needed paid courses, a members-only forum and certificates, and the builder’s app store had one course add-on with no forum at all. They rebuilt on WordPress with LearnDash and BuddyPress, and the migration cost more than building on WordPress from the start would have. The lesson was not “builders are bad”; it was that the year-three list should drive the year-one choice.
Frequently asked questions
Does “WordPress” include WordPress.com?
Yes. W3Techs cannot distinguish a self-hosted install from a WordPress.com site because they run the same software. WordPress.com’s share of the total is a few percentage points at most.
Is WooCommerce counted separately?
W3Techs tracks WooCommerce as an ecommerce technology within WordPress sites. Sites running it count toward the WordPress figure above, and separately in the ecommerce-platform table where WooCommerce and Shopify are the top two.
Will WordPress get back to 43%?
Probably not soon, and it does not need to. The measurable thing to watch is whether the CMS-market share (58.9%) holds. A platform that keeps almost six in ten CMS sites is not in decline; it is mature.
Should I move my existing site because share dipped?
No. Moving platforms is expensive and risky, and a two-point change in a global statistic has no effect on your site. Move when your platform stops doing a job you need done, not because of a chart.
How often do the W3Techs figures change?
Daily, as a rolling average. Month-to-month movement of a few tenths of a percent is normal and usually reflects sampling, not real migration. Look at the yearly trend before drawing any conclusion.
What we’d do
Treat the market-share figure as what it is: evidence that the ecosystem will be there in five years, that talent is plentiful, and that integrations will keep arriving. Then make the decision on the jobs the site has to do. If those jobs involve content, community or learning, WordPress is the default for good reason, and our services team can help scope it. If you are on another platform and it has run out of road, our WordPress migration service handles the move, content and redirects included.
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