An interesting article I found in my Google News feed today from Venture Beat:

“WordPress now powers 30% of websites”

WordPress now powers 30 percent of the web, according to data from web technology survey firm W3Techs.

 

It’s worth noting here that this figure relates to the entire Web, regardless of whether a website uses a content management system (CMS) or not. If we’re looking at market share, WordPress actually claims 60.2 percent, up from 58.7 percent in November 2015. By comparison, its nearest CMS rival, Joomla, has seen its usage jump from 2.8 percent to 3.1 percent, while Drupal is up from 2.1 percent to 2.2 percent.

google.com/newsstand/s/CBIw3paWzDY

Not surprising.

After using many of the direct competitors like Joomla! and Drupal, the WordPress community is head-and-shoulders above the rest.   They have far more tools, services, products, developers, seminars, and other things necessary to build world-class sites or to quickly spin up another blog about cats (blech!) or technology (yay!).    While there are other services like Wix, Weebly, and Squarespace that make turn-key websites easy to produce — I often find people that have been using those platforms for a while coming to me to help them migrate to WordPress.    Seems that when most businesses grow they eventually hit a wall with those services and find they can’t do all they need within the constraints of a “we’ll dumb it down and do it all for you” sites-in-a-box.

Not that WordPress is the be-all-end-all of web presence software.    It does need to be updated in many areas on both the internal engine and customer-facing user experience side of things.  But WordPress is constantly evolving.   The forthcoming Gutenberg update planned in WordPress 5.0 will quickly close the gap on the UX side of things.    WordPress continues to expand as does Automattic and they are both pushing to improve the “WordPress Experience” from several directions after years of “coasting” as market leaders.

I think they are moving in the right direction and their 30% market share will continue to grow — at least until that inevitable “unknown” comes out of nowhere with something truly earth shattering.   Though my bets are on that being a “side loaded” project from Automattic that replaces WordPress with something that keeps that 30% of content intact while adding that AI-based Virtual Reality interface on top.