The short version: Around 43 to 44 percent of all websites on the internet run on WordPress, which works out to somewhere between 480 and 520 million sites depending on which domain count you trust. Among websites that use any content management system at all, WordPress’s share climbs to roughly 62 to 63 percent, more than every other CMS combined. That headline number is real, but a big chunk of those sites are dormant, abandoned, or parked domains that happen to have a WordPress install sitting on them.
The number everyone quotes
W3Techs has tracked CMS usage across the web for years by scanning millions of live domains and checking their source code for CMS fingerprints. Their most recent figures put WordPress at around 43.1 to 44.2 percent of all websites they can identify, and about 62 to 63 percent of the subset of websites that use a known CMS rather than a custom build.
To turn that percentage into an actual headcount, you need a total website figure to multiply it against. The commonly cited number floating around is roughly 1.1 to 1.13 billion registered domains, a figure that’s been repeated so often it’s practically folklore online. Multiply 43 percent by 1.1 billion and you land at just under 500 million WordPress sites. That’s the number you’ll see in most listicles, and it’s not wrong exactly, but it’s doing a lot of rounding.
Why the real figure is shakier than the headline suggests
Here’s the bit most articles on this topic skip past. That 1.1 billion “websites” figure includes every registered domain, whether or not anyone has ever built anything on it. It counts parked domains sitting blank at a registrar. It counts expired domains that got scooped up by a squatter and slapped with a one-page WordPress install to farm ad clicks. It counts domains that got a WordPress theme installed once in 2019 and never touched again.
Netcraft’s own surveys, which track a similarly large chunk of the web, regularly find that only a fraction of registered domains resolve to anything with real content on it, let alone content that’s been updated in the last year. Some industry estimates put the number of active, maintained websites at closer to 200 million globally, not 1.1 billion. If you apply WordPress’s share to that smaller, more honest pool, you’re looking at something nearer 85 to 100 million active WordPress sites, not half a billion. Both numbers are technically defensible. Neither is a lie. But they’re answering slightly different questions, and almost nobody who quotes the 500 million figure tells you that.
I mention this because I’ve spent years pulling reports for clients who ask “how big is WordPress really” before deciding whether to build on it, and the honest answer always needs a second sentence. The scale is real. The 500 million figure is not.
WordPress against the rest of the field
Once you strip WordPress out, the CMS market gets thin very quickly. Shopify sits around 6 to 7 percent of the CMS market, largely because it dominates ecommerce specifically. Wix runs somewhere between 3 and 4 percent. Squarespace is similar, usually 2 to 3 percent. Joomla and Drupal, the two CMS names that used to rival WordPress back in the mid 2000s, have both fallen to under 2 percent each. Drupal still powers some serious institutional sites, including large government and university systems, but its market share has been shrinking for over a decade while WordPress kept climbing.
What’s easy to miss is that WordPress isn’t winning because it’s the best piece of software on every metric. Anyone who has fought with plugin conflicts at 11pm before a client launch knows it has rough edges. It wins on ubiquity: the plugin ecosystem is enormous (over 60,000 plugins in the official repository alone), the hosting options are endless and cheap, and the pool of people who can build or fix a WordPress site is far bigger than the pool for any competitor. That network effect is the real moat, not the code quality.
What “built on WordPress” looks like in practice
The list of recognisable names running on WordPress is longer than most people expect. TechCrunch runs on WordPress VIP. Sony Music’s global site has run on it. The Walt Disney Company’s internal and public blogs have used it. NASA’s JPL sites have run WordPress instances for years. That range, from a tech news outlet to a space agency, is the point: WordPress scales from a hobby blog with 40 visitors a month to a media property handling millions of page views a day, using essentially the same core software with different hosting and caching layered on top.
I saw this firsthand a few years back when I helped a small B2B client migrate off a bespoke, badly documented custom CMS that only one freelance developer understood, onto WordPress. The old system had cost them a small fortune every time they wanted a new landing page, because only that one developer could touch it. Within six weeks on WordPress, their marketing team was building and publishing landing pages themselves using page builder plugins, no developer required for routine changes. That’s the practical case for WordPress’s market share: it’s not that it’s technically superior, it’s that the barrier to entry for maintaining it is low enough that a marketing person, not just a developer, can keep a site alive.
My own site has run on WordPress since 2009, through several redesigns, a plugin-caused security scare in 2016 that taught me to stop leaving plugins unupdated for months, and multiple migrations between hosts. That kind of longevity is common with WordPress precisely because moving a WordPress site, exporting the database, is a well-documented, well-supported process. Try doing that cleanly with most closed proprietary platforms.
Is WordPress growing or shrinking
Growing, but slower than it used to. Through most of the 2010s, WordPress’s share of the CMS market climbed steadily year over year, partly because it kept absorbing share from Joomla and Drupal, and partly because the sheer number of new websites being created kept expanding. Its growth has flattened somewhat since around 2021 to 2022 as Shopify and Wix picked up ground specifically in the small ecommerce and simple business site categories, the exact segment where a non-technical person doesn’t want to think about plugins, updates, or hosting at all.
That flattening matters if you’re choosing a platform today. WordPress remains the strongest option if you want full control, the widest plugin ecosystem, and the ability to hand the site to any developer on earth and have them understand it within an hour. It’s a weaker choice if you specifically want a locked-down, all-in-one system with zero maintenance thinking involved, which is exactly the gap Shopify and Squarespace have filled for a lot of small business owners.
Should the numbers change your own decision
If you’re weighing up whether to build your own site or blog on WordPress, the market share stat on its own shouldn’t be the deciding factor. What matters is what you’re publishing and how much control you’ll want later. If you’re planning to write regularly and eventually monetise, my full walkthrough on how to start a blog in 2026 covers the practical setup steps, including where WordPress earns its reputation versus where a simpler platform might serve you better at the start.
If the plan is to build a site around recommending products, the CMS matters less than the structure of your content and offers, which is covered in my guide to affiliate marketing in 2026. And whatever platform you land on, the market share stat is meaningless if the site doesn’t turn visitors into leads or sales, so it’s worth reading through what moves the needle on how to improve your conversion rate once the site is live, because a WordPress site with a 0.5 percent conversion rate is worse than a Squarespace site converting at 3 percent.
For anyone weighing up all the different routes to earning from a website once it’s built, whether that’s ads, products, services, or affiliate links, my broader list of 51+ real ways to make money online is worth a read before you commit to a build.
Frequently asked questions
How many websites use WordPress in 2026?
Roughly 480 to 520 million websites are built on WordPress if you count every registered domain running it, or closer to 85 to 100 million if you count only sites that are actively maintained and updated. The headline figure people repeat almost always uses the larger, less filtered number.
What percentage of the internet is WordPress?
WordPress powers about 43 to 44 percent of all websites that CMS trackers like W3Techs can identify, and roughly 62 to 63 percent of websites that specifically use a known content management system rather than a custom-built site.
Is WordPress still growing or losing market share?
It’s still growing overall but at a slower pace than during the 2010s, as Shopify and Wix have taken share specifically in the simple ecommerce and small business site categories, while WordPress remains dominant for blogs, media sites, and anything needing deep customisation.
How many WordPress websites are active, not abandoned?
Nobody has an exact figure, but industry estimates suggest a large share of the roughly 500 million WordPress installs are parked domains, expired sites, or abandoned projects, meaning the realistic count of actively updated WordPress sites is likely well under half that headline number.
