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According to the front page of WordPress.com (screenshot, in case the page changes):

WordPress powers 27% of the internet.

Unfortunately no source is provided for that statement. Is this number true?

JonathanReez
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    To be sure, wordpress (the software) powers exactly 0% of the internet, even saying they powered _27% of websites_ would be reaching, what's apache do if it's not powering the website? I'd settle for "_Wordpress takes up 27% of the internet_" or "_Wordpress is used on 27% of websites_".. No clue where they got the 27% from. – 8eecf0d2 Dec 12 '16 at 01:58
  • I would believe to that claim only someone who has actually crawled with a crawler (and not using a toolbar) top 100 bilion web pages sorted by page rank (excluding of course pages of search engines), Another good indicator would be the pagerank of the top 100 blogs hosted directly by wordpress.com . Actually the number of pages and not the number of websites is a major indicator of diffusion to me. Statistics never lie, but their interpretation always lie because you merged a number of variables into a number and there is freedom in choosing the variables ^^. – CoffeDeveloper Dec 12 '16 at 12:40
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    @DarioOO A crawler won't be able to give you the whole picture. Any webserver can easily masquerade that it uses any technology or simply hide it's details from the crawler. I can configure my web server to report that it runs on "Hamsters and caffeine version 9.34" and a web crawler will gladly report that statistic. However, it's the best we got. – MonkeyZeus Dec 12 '16 at 16:29
  • Yeah I know a website can maskerate the useranget, however I was just referring to pars the page searching for the footer "powered by Wordpress". It could be removed by a custom template of course, but is better than nothing. You will now that the % is bigger than what is measured that way. – CoffeDeveloper Dec 12 '16 at 18:26
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    I highly doubt that number. If I remember correctly, the majority of "the Internet" is still email, not the web, and WordPress has exactly nothing to do with email. For WordPress to power 27% of the Internet, they would have to power far more than 27% of the web, which is highly doubtful. One number I heard was that about 2/3 are email, which would mean for WordPress to reach 27%, there would a) have to be nothing else except the web and email (but there is also file transfer, for example) and b) WordPress would have to power close to 100% of the web. – Jörg W Mittag Dec 12 '16 at 21:26
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    @JörgWMittag - for many people (ie, not network or computer/IT types), the internet is synonymous with the web, and email is something else - common response from the highly-educated science staff when told "the internet is down" is "what about email?". –  Dec 12 '16 at 22:15
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    @JörgWMittag source for 2/3 of the Internet being email? That would make for a great Skeptics question! – JonathanReez Dec 12 '16 at 22:23
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    @HorusKol To be fair, it is quite possible in an organization to still be able to access e-mail when the Internet is down, with the caveat that new incoming mail from outside the organization won't arrive nor will outgoing e-mail to outside the organization get sent until the Internet connection comes back up. – Michael Dec 12 '16 at 23:52
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    Electricity! It powers 100% of the internet! Sign up today! – djsmiley2kStaysInside Dec 13 '16 at 08:00
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    @djsmiley2k Agree. – m4n0 Dec 13 '16 at 12:15
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    @ManojKumar you can't validly disagree, I'm not wrong. ;) – djsmiley2kStaysInside Dec 13 '16 at 12:44
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    @HorusKol The thing is though, that's a perfectly valid question. Just because the internet is down does not mean that internal company email is down. Whether it's the ISP having problems, [a granny cuts the country's internet line](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/apr/06/georgian-woman-cuts-web-access), or the company switch has been set ablaze is not communicated to the people affected. "The Internet is down" is simply easier to communicate. – MonkeyZeus Dec 13 '16 at 13:42
  • I swear I remember a quote that Wordpress powers something ludicrous like 80 or 90% of the interenet, but now I can't find it. – stannius Dec 13 '16 at 16:28
  • @MonkeyZeus except that they are usually asking about email to the outside rather than internal emails –  Dec 14 '16 at 00:48
  • @Michael Granted, they might access their local mail accounts and queue outbound mails, or even send internal mail (unless by some stupidity they rely on external DNS to do so). But then they may also be able to visit some internal web server - and that might even be "powered" by Wordpress. – Hagen von Eitzen Dec 14 '16 at 06:39
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    If neither Facebook nor Youtube are based on WP, even the claim that 27% of the www are powered by wordpress makes one raise an eyebrow – Hagen von Eitzen Dec 14 '16 at 06:46

2 Answers2

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This number comes from W3Techs - World Wide Web Technology Surveys.

According to that survey, as of December 2016,

WordPress is used by 27.2% of all the websites

that they monitor. (Source.)

However,

  • when they say "all websites", they mean "the top 10 million websites",
  • when they say "websites", they mean "domains", and
  • when they say "used by", they mean "used by at least one page on that domain."

As they note:

When interpreting our surveys, you should know the following:

  • We investigate technologies of websites, not of individual web pages. If we find a technology on any of the pages, it is considered to be used by the website.
  • We include only the top 10 million websites (top 1 million before June 2013) in the statistics in order to limit the impact of domain spammers. We use website popularity rankings provided by Alexa (an Amazon.com company) using a 3 months average ranking. Alexa rankings are sometimes considered inaccurate for measuring website traffic, but we find that they serve our purpose of providing a representative sample of established sites very well.
  • We do not consider subdomains to be separate websites. For instance, sub1.example.com and sub2.example.com are considered to belong to the same site as example.com. That means for example, that all the subdomains of blogger.com, wordpress.com and similar sites are counted only as one website.

(Also see their disclaimer for further caveats.)

Community
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ff524
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    Aren't Alexa rankings based on the use of the Alexa toolbar and thus represent a really really small and biaised sample? Because in this case WordPress would represent 27.2% of the American Wide Web, not the WWW... – Shautieh Dec 12 '16 at 02:52
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    A simple count of websites is misleading. My (hypothetical) personal website might hold a single page of text, yet it is a website, just as e.g. Google, Wikipedia, or indeed, StackExchange. – jamesqf Dec 12 '16 at 05:14
  • @jamesqf Note that since StackExchange uses (or has used) Wordpress for their blogs, that would also count their domains in the "powered by Wordpress" statistic. – Xiong Chiamiov Dec 14 '16 at 00:37
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    A nitpicky thing, but the quote also says "the internet", while your answer points out that the data they're referencing is for the *web*. There's a lot of internet traffic that isn't part of the world wide web, like email, irc, usenet, etc. – Xiong Chiamiov Dec 14 '16 at 00:39
  • Comments are not for extended discussion; this conversation has been [moved to chat](http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/50065/discussion-on-answer-by-ff524-does-wordpress-power-27-of-the-internet). – Oddthinking Dec 14 '16 at 00:57
  • @XiongChiamiov True, but also according to this answer, `*.stackexchange.com` is just one site. – Mark Hurd Dec 22 '16 at 11:54
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While the number is real it means (as per other answer) something different in W3Techs report (source for it) — share in top 10 million sites by traffic sample.

But that doesn't say if the number is true or close to true for global market share.

I had looked into other possible estimates for my blog post on topic:

  • BuiltWith currently estimates WordPress to have 4.9% market share based on 365 millions sites sample;
  • previously released WordPress site count of 77 millions in 2014 put market share at approximately 7.8% at the time.

So while the number is real for specific sample of sites, applying it to whole web market share seems like a stretch and makes result inconsistent with other sources.

There is also huge variation possible depending on how hosted WordPress.com sites are counted. They make a very significant portion of total WordPress sites but are counted as a single site if subdomains are not considered.

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