We collect these numbers because we use them: in audits, in client strategy calls, and in the occasional debate about whether WordPress is ‘still relevant’ (see the first section for how that debate goes). Sources are the standard industry trackers: W3Techs, BuiltWith, Store Leads, WPScan, HTTP Archive, and Google’s Chrome UX Report, plus our own audit data where noted.
Market share and usage
- WordPress powers 43.5% of all websites on the internet in 2026
- That’s a 61%+ share of the CMS market, more than the next ten platforms combined
- The runner-up website builder, Shopify, holds roughly 4.8% of all websites
- Wix and Squarespace together account for under 5% of the web
- Over 500 new WordPress sites launch every day among the top 10 million sites alone
- WordPress has held the #1 CMS position for 15+ consecutive years
- 60,000+ free plugins live in the official repository, with tens of thousands more sold commercially
The WordPress economy
- The global WordPress services economy is estimated at over $50 billion, with the U.S. as the single largest market
- The U.S. WordPress services market alone (development, design, optimization, maintenance, security) is estimated at $8-10 billion annually
- There are over 36 million small businesses in the U.S., and 73-83% of them have a website
- Freelance WordPress developer rates in the U.S. typically run $50-150/hour; specialist agencies bill $100-250/hour
WooCommerce and e-commerce
- WooCommerce runs on 5-6 million active stores globally, projected to reach ~7.2 million by 2028
- The U.S. leads with over 2 million active WooCommerce stores
- WooCommerce holds the largest share of e-commerce platform usage among the top 1 million sites, ahead of Shopify
- Cart abandonment averages 70%+ across e-commerce; poor Core Web Vitals can push abandonment up by another 40%
- Every 1 second of additional load time costs roughly 7% in conversions
- Stores using one-page checkout see abandonment rates 10-20 points lower than multi-step flows (our audit data)
Security
- Roughly 13,000 WordPress sites are hacked every day
- 92% of WordPress breaches trace back to outdated or vulnerable plugins
- 7,900+ new WordPress vulnerabilities were disclosed in 2025, the large majority in plugins, not core
- Small businesses are the target of ~43% of all cyberattacks, yet only 14% say they’re prepared
- The average cost of a hacked small business site, cleanup, downtime, and lost sales, runs $2,000-$10,000+
- Sites with two-factor authentication and a WAF block the overwhelming majority of automated attack traffic
Performance and Core Web Vitals
- Only ~44% of WordPress sites pass all three Core Web Vitals on mobile
- 53% of mobile visitors abandon a page that takes longer than 3 seconds to load
- The median WordPress site loads 2-4x more JavaScript than it did five years ago
- Moving from shared to managed hosting typically improves TTFB by 40-70%
- WebP images average 25-35% smaller than equivalent-quality JPEG
- PHP 8.2+ handles 50-70% more requests per second than PHP 7.4 in WordPress benchmarks
SEO and content
- Google uses Core Web Vitals and page experience as ranking inputs, confirmed, though content relevance still dominates
- ~95% of pages that rank get at least some backlinks; pages with zero referring domains rarely rank for competitive terms
- The #1 organic result captures roughly 27% of clicks; page 2 captures almost nothing
- Sites publishing consistently (4+ quality posts monthly) grow organic traffic 3-4x faster than sporadic publishers over 12 months
Use these numbers
Cite anything here freely with a link back to this page. We update the set as the 2026 data landscape shifts, and if you spot a number that’s aged out, tell us and we’ll fix it, that’s the deal that keeps a statistics page trustworthy.
Where your site fits: Most of the failure statistics above, the 56% failing Core Web Vitals, the 92% of breaches through outdated plugins, describe preventable states. A free audit tells you which side of each number your site is on.
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