WordPress statistics 2020: most used versions, market share, number of downloads…

September 29, 2020| MondialPress

WordPress is a free open source CMS available since May 27, 2003. It has been downloaded over 1.86 billion times.

WordPress 4.9, a record number of downloads

With 238 million downloads, version 4.9 blew up WordPress counters. Today the CMS has 39 major versions (and 419 minor versions), and the latest is 5.5. It has been available since August 2020.

78% of sites use WordPress 5.x

More than 50% of WordPress sites use versions 5.4 and 5.5 (24% for 5.4 and 28% for 5.5). However version 4.9 is still present on 10% of sites.

This large percentage is mainly due to the significant change of the editor when switching to WordPress 5.0. This major change is the arrival of Gutenberg, which allows content to be managed visually using blocks. We note that many users preferred to stay at version 4.x to avoid switching to Gutenberg. Note that there is a plugin to use the classic editor on WordPress 5: useful for keeping the old editor using an up-to-date CMS!

WordPress powers 38.5% of websites

WordPress’ market share is very large. Indeed, the CMS propels no less than 38.5% of websites in general, and especially 63.6% of sites that use a CMS on the market, according to the latest statements from w3techs. By itself, WordPress thus represents a larger market share than all of its competitors combined. Shopify (4.8% of sites designed with a CMS on the market) and Joomla (3.7%) complete the podium.

Long-term secure versions since WordPress 3.7

On the security side, WordPress has offered extensive support since version 3.7. Concretely, security updates are offered with each new flaw discovered and all versions of WordPress launched since 2013 are supported! Previously, security updates were only offered for the most recent major version of WordPress. In addition, these security updates are deployed automatically by default, to limit the exploitation of vulnerabilities.

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