Matt Mullenweg Sheds Some Light on WordPress’ Market Share in Exclusive WordCamp Talk

by Vipe Team in WordPress Development; Published on 10.06.2022

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This year’s WordCamp Europe was a truly remarkable event. The beautiful city of Porto got to welcome WordPress enthusiasts from all around the world for the first in-person gathering since 2019. Our WordPress agency for enterprise was a proud sponsor of the camp, and our founder, Ivan Popov, conducted an interesting lecture on “How Headless WordPress Benefits Enterprises?”.

*Want to learn more about all the exciting things that happened at WCEU 2022? Read our recap post HERE!

The biggest WordPress event in the world concluded with a Q&A session with none other than Matt Mullenweg (Co-founder of WordPress) and Josepha Haden Chomphosy (WordPress Executive Director), who are two of the main driving forces behind WordPress.

Now it’s time for Matt, Matias and Josepha! #WCEU22 #WCEU pic.twitter.com/rctBjlvTNM
— Vipe Studio (@Vipe_Studio) June 4, 2022

The two covered a wide array of topics, all concerning the future of WordPress. Among the many great questions that came from the audience’s members, one asking, in particular, caught the attention of our enterprise WordPress agency’s team. The subject of the question:

WordPress’ market share

So, Sebastiaan van der Lans from WordProof asked Matt about WordPress’ market share, noting that although the current market share is over 40%, it’s not growing as fast as it did before.

He asked what can we do presently to make sure that 10 years from now WordPress will power at least 50% of the Internet? An interesting question, indeed, especially given the fact that all WordPress companies, users, and enthusiasts are constantly boosting the popularity of the CMS by proudly sharing impressive data about its market share.

Are you curious to find out what Matt Mullenweg had to say about the numbers associated with WordPress’ market share? Read on to get Matt’s answer that actually managed to surprise our WordPress agency for enterprise.

WordPress’ Market Share Is… (You’ll Be Surprised)

Matt Mullenweg seemed very pleased that someone brought the market share question up. In fact, he said that this was something he had planned to address at this year’s WordCamp Europe.

He then moved on to explain that, according to him, the measurement of WordPress’ market share is going to get “wonky” over the next year (and in the coming years). Matt noted that the numbers have actually gone pretty much steadily up. There is a big “BUT”, though.

What’s happening with WordPress’ market share numbers, Matt clarified, has a lot to do with how W3Techs (the website that provides information about the usage of various types of technologies on the web) calculates those numbers.

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Now, this really made our enterprise WordPress agency, and everyone else in the audience, stop for a moment and think. After all, the people who make a living, thanks to WordPress (including us) often tend to cite data from W3Techs when referring to WP’s market share.

On W3Techs and Its Reliability

Mullenweg explained that W3Techs primarily uses a service called Alexa to determine the technologies utilised by a given website (you can learn more about how W3Techs works on their FAQ page).

This Alexa service has nothing to do with the Alexa voice assistant that we all know, although, interestingly enough, the Alexa Matt was referring to is also owned by Amazon (seems like the guys there simply like this name).

And so, the Alexa service (full name Alexa Internet) that is employed by W3Techs is an internet-tracking service. If you’ve never heard of this Alexa, our WordPress agency for enterprise can tell you that the service monitors traffic as visitors navigate different websites, thus determining their popularity.

Alexa obtains the data from online users who use its browser extension software and from websites that install its traffic monitoring software. However, in an announcement post, Alexa.com said the company is no longer offering new subscriptions as of December 8, 2021, and will entirely shut operations on May 1, 2022.

In reference to this, Matt Mullenweg said that Alexa obviously cannot be a reliable source of data anymore, and even though their API will be available till the end of the year, he considers that data to be getting kind of stale.

Matt continued by saying that now when W3Techs and other similar websites move to some different source of data, that can have as large as a 25-30% impact on the numbers associated with WordPress’ market share. Our enterprise WordPress agency can absolutely see how this shift will have a substantial effect on the numbers.

So, How Can We Reliably Measure WordPress’ Market Share?

Mullenweg brought the audience’s attention to a different source of data, called BuiltWith, which puts WordPress’ market share closer to the 30% (or mid 30%) range. According to Matt, the real answer is probably somewhere between that.

Also, our WordPress agency for enterprise really liked the moment when Matt jokingly said that even if those “new” numbers turn out to be true, it wouldn’t really be that much of a big deal, and we’ll get to celebrate 40% market share all over again. Woo-hoo to that!

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We believe Mullenweg said something really important. In his own words:

“The market share stuff is not really a goal, but a result.”

Matt explained that rather than focusing on market share numbers, we need to concentrate on creating accessible software, available in as many languages as possible, regardless of technical or economic ability.

According to Mullenweg, the most crucial thing is to create an inclusive community, which has actually already happened, as WordCamp Europe proved.

Our enterprise WordPress agency totally agrees with Matt, and we also stand behind his main philosophy, which revolves around being adaptive to the ever-changing world of technology. As Mullenweg noted, this flexible state of mind is exactly what keeps WordPress growing so fast even 19 years after its inception.

Matt reminded everyone that most software doesn’t last this long. In his own words:

“We’re now stronger than ever.”

After these highly optimistic words, our WordPress agency for enterprise was happy to see Josepha Haden Chomphosy joining in to add that she and Matt are actually looking at some research about WordPress’ market share numbers.

She said they’re working really hard to determine what those numbers are and what they should be. As it was made clear, they are also trying to figure out what service they want to use to have a more consistent concept of what those numbers should be as they go on.

Josepha explained that once they find a way to get reliable WordPress market share measurements, these numbers/data will be published on the ‘make’ blogs (like make core). In conclusion, she assured the audience that they’ve been talking about this for a while now and are really taking a look at it.

Our enterprise WordPress agency really liked how Matt finished answering the question about WordPress’ market share. He actually brought the audience’s attention to Tumblr, which is also owned by Automattic. He said that if they manage to bring Tumblr blogs over to WordPress, this will have a further impact on WP’s market share numbers.

Mullenweg reminded us that Tumblr has 300 000 domains (Tumblr is 10% the size of Twitter). So, if all Tumblr blogs (there are 5 million blogs created) come over to WordPress, this will give an additional big boost to the numbers.

Can WordPress Reach 85% Market Share in the Next Decade?

Our WordPress agency for enterprise was curious to find out that Matt Mullenweg actually brought up the question about WP’s market share earlier this year in an interview for The Verge.

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In this piece, Mullenweg predicted that WordPress will probably reach 80–85% market share in the next decade. Now, those are some really big numbers. He went on to explain that he believes this can become a reality because WordPress is open-source software, meaning that it’s completely free and it belongs to everyone.

This very reason creates a highly beneficial environment for the CMS to grow and evolve at a rapid speed. Matt noted that if we analyse the rate of WordPress’ evolution, we’ll quickly see that the platform easily outperforms any proprietary competition (even those with hundreds of millions or billions of cash behind them).

Our enterprise WordPress agency agrees that no proprietary solution can match the brilliance of what comes as a result of the collective effort of many people working on a single project.

So, can WordPress reach an 85% market share in the next decade? No one can say that for sure, but one thing is for certain – WP will continue to evolve and adapt to the dynamic digital landscape.

Market Share Numbers Aren’t Everything

In conclusion, we can say that at the end of the day, numbers are just numbers. Yes, it’s really cool to be able to promote WordPress as the most popular CMS in the world that powers nearly half of the whole Internet, but here’s the thing:

WordPress doesn’t need to rely on numbers to prove itself.

Our WordPress agency for enterprise believes that the mere fact that so many large-scale enterprise organisations have already built their high-traffic sites on WordPress, proves that the platform is truly the most versatile and scalable solution out there.

What’s more, we need to get out of the WordPress bubble and explore other CMSs and technological solutions as well. This will ensure that we will all collectively educate ourselves and we will bring back needed experiences and lessons to WordPress.

Of course, numbers can be impressive too, but hey! As Matt Mullenweg said on this year’s WordCamp Europe – even if WordPress powers 30-35% of all websites whose content management system we know, this is still a pretty huge accomplishment!

And where do we go from here? Well, as the old saying goes – the sky’s the limit. So, the best is yet to come!