8 Freaking Facts About WordPress

I love WordPress, can’t stress it anymore. It is a software that had made digital publishing as smooth as silk. Before WordPress there used to be other Content Management Systems, but not as good as this open source software. Millions of users around the globe use it, but not most of it’s users really know as much about WordPress as they should. So here I have written 8 freaking facts about WordPress. These are cool, surprising and even shocking!

Let’s start.

#1 WordPress is 100% open source software. It is distributed under a license called GNU General Public License, a well-known license in the open source industry. This means not only you are free to view source code of the software, but also modify it under certain conditions. By free they mean “free as in speech”. So yes, WordPress is free as in speech, not as in coffee. Open source softwares are free to distribute, view source code of and modify certain code under various conditions. This answers the question “what are costs of WordPress?”, meaning “none, it’s 100% free”.This is an astonishing fact considering the # of websites on the powered by WordPress. For more on GNU license.

#2 There are good chances you might have thought, “if WordPress is so popular, why is it free? why people building WordPress don’t sell it?” Well, that is because there is not an individual or a team laid out to build, maintain and distribute the software, WordPress. Sure there is a core team that leads the project development, but WordPress is built by the thousands of contributions of hundreds of volunteers around the world either in form of patches, bug-fixing, suggesting features. Over 1-sixth of all websites are run using WordPress.

#3 According to Google’s Keyword Planner tool, word “wordpress” is searched for 2,740,000 times in an average month. That’s just # of search queries for “wordpress”, there happen to be plenty of queries for terms like “wordpress plugins”, “wordpress themes”. So according to an estimate around 30 million searches are made regarding wordpress terms, each month, on Google. Combined search queries made via other major search engines would certainly be surprising.

#4 WordPress now powers 18.9% of the web with # of sites built with WordPress growing day after day. Alone in 2013, WordPress was downloaded over 46 million times. According to W3Techs, almost 55% of the 1 million most visited websites that are run on a content management system (CMS) are run on WordPress.

#5 WordPress powers CNN, Forbes, TechCrunch, Mashable, et cetera. That’s just a glance at BIG websites using the Content Management System in question. Most of the websites that we visit and use on a regular basis are also powered by WordPress. You might want to check out big websites using WordPress. WordPress must be enjoying a lot of bloggers, since it is the 18th most visited website in the world.

#6 There are more than 2,700 themes hosted at WordPress.org. That’s aside from those available to be used by WordPress.com websites and those distributed otherwise than via WordPress’ official themes directory. These themes combined have generated over 116,243,079+ times and counting! Whereas for plugins, there are over 34,000 plugins only from WordPress’ official directory. These have generated over 770,068,540 times.

#7 Did I mention that you can use WordPress regardless of whether you English or not? Yes, WordPress software has been translated into over 73 different languages. Among these languages are Japanese, Norwegian, Slovenian, Hebrew, Spanish, Indonasian, English (Canada), Swedish, Slovak, Romanian, Polish, Russian, Scottish Gaelic, Italian, Dutch, Macedonian, French – and so many more that it’s boring to name them all here!

#8 WordPress related skills are on verge to rise. According to Elance, a freelancing company, there are over 2,000+ open jobs on average all the time. So it’s certain from the aforementioned insight that anyone looking to multiply his/her revenue from doing programming jobs must consider learning WordPress. And, I almost forgot to mention that for a WordPress job average hourly rate is around 20$? That’s yet another compelling insight to convince to consider learning the software.