What is WordPress?
WordPress is a CMS, Free Open Source , content management system available to everyone that one can use and modify. It is used to create and update dynamic websites. It provides simple and easy ways to edit web content, without extensive programming knowledge. Created in 2003, it is now the most popular software in its category.
WP in a few figures…
- WordPress, web content management system is the most widely used CMS on the web. 59.3% of websites are built around it, This is equivalent to 17 million sites. Its closest competitor Joomla leads 6.2% of the market share, while Drupal has 4.9%.
- 17 million sites also means 69.8 million articles written monthly on the platform, or 542 million words written per day.
- PHP (recursive acronym) programmers offer themes on different platforms (the most well-known being themeforest), There are 4081 free themes and 46,291 free plug-ins (or exetentions) dedicated to the functions of websites.
Some of the most popular extensions (the most downloaded and installed) are:
- Akismet, who manages spam comments
- Contact form 7 which allows the easy online posting of contact forms
- Google xml Sitemaps, which generates the sitemap.xml
- NextGen Gallery to create slideshows and photo gallery
- etc
A popular free CMS… which pays off
While the platform is open source and free, themes and plugins are increasingly paid, Envato is the biggest site that distributes them. In 2015, it earned more than C$500 million in revenue. Some paid themes generate between $1000 and $10,000 per month.
- About 490 people work for Automattic, the main company of WordPress. In nine years, the company has raised more than $200 million from its investors.
- The popularity of WordPress continues to grow. In 2016, 22.2 million pages were viewed by Internet users.
- The Google search engine offers 1.6 billion results on the query “WordPress”.
Several popular brands and sites use WP :
- The New York Times,
- Samsung
- Coca cola
Celebrities also use this software for their own web pages, including:
- Jay Z,
- Russel Brand
- Tom Jones.
Very widespread and therefore very attacked
- Websites under WP are also the most hacked.
- In 2011, 18 million users were targeted by hackers.
- In 2014, more than 162,000 sites were attacked by DDoS ; an attack aimed at making the infrastructure or service unavailable.
The same year, WordPress reset 100,000 passwords, out of concern for the computer security of its members, following a leak at Google.
In addition, the majority of updates are related to security.
In 2016, during the Panama Papers affair, 2.6 terabytes of data and 11.5 million documents were stolen. Recall that the Panamanian law firm claims to have been hacked and its documents and data stolen.
For its part, the American magazine Forbes has instead pointed to the neglected use and lack of updates of the software.
These numbers demonstrate without a doubt that WordPress is indeed the most popular and widely used website builder software. Want to know more? Take a look at the 12 good reasons to use WP.
WP more suitable for SEO?
Not so sure!
- By default WordPress is far from SEO-optimized, if only because it’s a duplicate content factory.
This article by Daniel Roch who reacted to a provocation by L Bourelly has not aged!
- Its popularity comes mainly from its user-friendliness and the large number of scripts available to the public.
- If it is so popular with many “SEO experts” who are multiplying in Quebec and “Web makers“, it is mainly because a mass of them do not code… and don’t know any other web development platform. Brief…
WordPess can be configured and enriched according to the client’s project and the site’s objectives. The ten clicks that allow you to put a site online in an hour are not enough to position your site on the 1st page of Google’s results. Far without WordPress fault or not.