28 Facts You Probably Don’t Know About WordPress

Just about everyone who has gone through the process of trying to figure out exactly how they will get a website online has run into WordPress already. It is an extremely popular CMS but you might not realise just how many websites are using it in 2016.

A lot of basic WordPress websites are easily identifiable as they use the basic themes and layouts that a lot of others use. There are some very well “hidden” users of the WordPress platform as well. They are not really trying to hide anything. It is a credit to the platform itself that it is so customizable, to the point where the end user has no idea what is powering a website.

So, let’s get down to the statistics. Almost 60% of websites that use a content management system are using WordPress. That is over 17 million websites in total. At the time of making this infographic, the most recent version of this CMS – WordPress 4.6 – has been downloaded almost 4 million times. This last statistic shows us that the popularity of the platform is not just made up of older websites that are no longer maintained.

Over half a billion words are published every day of the year on websites powered by WordPress and almost 70 million new posts are published every month. This includes giants of the online world such as Mashable, TechCrunch, The Wall Street Journal, Reuters and so on.

WordPress provides an almost endless amount of customizations that you can use on your website. There are over 45,000 plugins available for free which adds functionality, and over 4,000 free themes that can change the look of a website.

Alternatively as many people do, you can build your WordPress website from the ground up. This means you can do basically anything that you want. If you go down this path, you will need to learn a lot more about the CMS. It also means that you can come out with an end product that is completely different to all of the other websites using this platform.

All of the options available to you with the WordPress platform make it so that your website doesn’t have to look like a regular kind of blog. If you’re in to photography, you can make a website on an image-based theme that focuses on your photos more than text. If you publish a lot of videos, you can make a website that looks more like YouTube and less like a regular text-based website.

There Is Money To Be Made

It’s not just the websites running on WordPress that actually make money. You can actually earn a living just by developing themes or plugins for the platform. Although most of the themes and plugins for WordPress are free, a lot of them also have premium upgrades or other features that users will pay for.

To give you an idea of how much money can be made by WordPress developers, we put together a few statistics on this for our infographic. For example, half of the themes on the website ThemeForest bring in over a thousand dollars per month in sales. That’s just one theme sold on one website. If you do the math, you can imagine that the real figures go much higher for those making multiple themes and selling them at multiple outlets.

Of course, that figure of a thousand dollars per month is just the starting point that covers around 50% of the themes available on that website. To continue the breakdown in sales, we see that 25% of the themes bring in $2,500 per month – 15% bring in $5,000 per month – 7% bring in $7,500 per month – 5% bring in $10,000 per month.

Developing a popular WordPress theme that generates this kind of money is not something you can just jump into one day and hope for success the next day. It is a long learning process before that point is reached.

WordPress Security Breaches

Yes, it’s sad but true that WordPress has been the target of some quite large security breaches. It just goes to show that once you become big enough and popular enough you will become the target of people who want to take you down. The same thing happened with Windows when it became the most popular operating system for home computers. It became the target for virus makers, WordPress is not immune to that.

Many of these security breaches could have happened to anyone, regardless of which platform they were using or which precautions they had taken. For example, some of the breaches were a result of simple brute force attacks against the login page on WordPress websites. The attackers were using programs to seek out login pages and then make multiple attempts at the login name and password of users. The solution to this is simple, do not use the default “admin” username and do not use a common password that is easy to guess.

Another set of attacks that happened in 2014 were done using XML-RPC, which is not exclusive to WordPress websites. This breach caused over 150,000 legitimate WordPress websites to attack the chosen targets. The attack worked by requesting data over and over from many different sources until the targeted websites couldn’t handle the pressure anymore. Their servers crumbled under the pressure and their websites went offline.

Now that you have read a bit about WordPress and hopefully learned a thing or two, you should not forget to check out the full infographic. There is plenty more information to be found in the graphic that we didn’t have time to discuss here.

I hope you enjoyed this article and infographic regarding Wordpress.  I will come back with another one soon.