There’s no disputing the fact that WordPress is by far the most prominent CMS out there. The brainchild of Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little, WordPress has risen to superstardom in the blogosphere in the 11 short years since it was released.
- 35.2% of the web is powered by WordPress.
- There are 24.8 million live WordPress sites.
- 409 million people view 15.5 billion pages every month.
- 41.7 million posts are published every month on WordPress.
- English is used in 71% of its posts.
- The most popular WordPress theme has earned more than $34.6 million.
- 1,084 WordCamps have been held so far.
- The average pay for WordPress developers is $51,000.
- There are 55,897 plugins for WordPress available.
- 39% of hacked WordPress sites run an outdated version of the software.
Bonus fun facts:
All the major WordPress releases were named after jazz musicians.
Ever since version 1.0 hit the web in January 2003, WordPress developers showed their love of jazz music by naming the critical releases after the famous musicians of this genre. Miles Davis, Ella Fitzgerald, and Chet Baker are just some of them. Rahsaan Roland Kirk is the name behind WordPress’s latest version.
WordPress was used to guide a missile (well, sort of).
In the TV series Strike Back, code from WordPress’s post.js file was used for “missile guidance.” After noticing the peculiarity, coders implemented a line that reads “weapon locked” into the original file.
The Panama papers leak was caused by a plugin vulnerability.
The notorious Panama papers leak, perhaps the most important data breach in history, can be attributed to poor plugin choices. The WP SMTP plugin—which stored email server addresses and login info in plain text in the WordPress database—was to blame for the leak, which included more than 4.8 million emails.