Need a WordPress number you can quote without someone correcting you?
Use this one: WordPress runs 38.6% of all websites, or 57.6% of sites with a known CMS, in W3Techs’ data for 15 November 2026. Both are right. They divide by different things.
For these WordPress statistics, we also pulled WordPress.org’s live version data and scanned 2,000 sites ourselves.
The bigger story? WordPress has lost five points of the web since January 2025, and Shopify isn’t the one taking them.
Key WordPress statistics at a glance
Every figure below was checked on 15 November 2026.
- W3Techs finds WordPress on 38.6% of all sites it tracks, more than every other CMS combined.
- That share was 43.6% in January 2025, its highest January reading. Five points are gone.
- Two in three WordPress installs (66.2%) run version 7.1, which came out on 19 August 2026.
- About 31.9% of installs run unsupported PHP, and that rises to 54% on 1 January 2027.
- The official directory lists 75,093 free plugins and 8,833 free themes.
- Only 42.6% of installs use US English, so most WordPress sites run in another language.
- In our scan of 1,000 random sites, 24.1% of the homepages we could read ran WordPress.
- One in five WordPress sites that showed a version had missed the latest security release.
What share of the web runs WordPress in 2026?
WordPress runs 38.6% of all websites. Count only sites using a content management system W3Techs can identify, and it’s 57.6%.
The gap is the denominator. On 32.9% of sites, W3Techs finds no CMS it knows: hand-coded pages, custom apps, static sites. Leave them in and WordPress gets 38.6%. Take them out and it jumps to 57.6%.
That’s why you’ll read “43% of the web” in one article and “60% of the CMS market” in another. Both were true once, in January 2025 and January 2026. Neither holds today.
Our own scan found the same gap, only wider. WordPress ran 24.1% of the 631 random homepages we could read. Among the 218 where we spotted one of the nine platforms we checked for, it was 69.7%.
Why wider? We read homepages only, so a brand with WordPress on its blog subdomain counted as “none”. And smaller CMSs we didn’t look for landed in that pile too.
WordPress vs Shopify, Wix and everyone else
WordPress is still seven times the size of its nearest rival:
| Platform | Share of all websites | Share of sites with a known CMS |
|---|---|---|
| WordPress | 38.6% | 57.6% |
| Shopify | 5.4% | 8.1% |
| Wix | 4.2% | 6.2% |
| Squarespace | 2.4% | 3.6% |
| Joomla | 1.0% | 1.6% |
| Webflow | 0.8% | 1.2% |
| Tilda | 0.8% | 1.2% |
| Drupal | 0.6% | 0.9% |
| No CMS detected | 32.9% | Not counted |
The Shopify comparison hides a detail. W3Techs finds WooCommerce on 19.7% of WordPress sites, which works out to about 7.6% of all websites. By that maths, there are more WooCommerce stores than Shopify ones.
Wix, Squarespace and Webflow sell an easier start, and they’ve grown slowly but steadily for a decade. Weighing one against WordPress? Our Webflow vs Wix comparison shows what you trade for that ease.
Is WordPress losing market share?
Yes. WordPress fell from 43.6% of all websites in January 2025 to 38.6% today. It’s the first real drop in W3Techs’ yearly table, which goes back to 2015.
| Date | Share of all websites | Share of CMS sites |
|---|---|---|
| 1 January 2015 | 23.3% | 60.7% |
| 1 January 2020 | 35.4% | 62.1% |
| 1 January 2022 | 43.2% | 65.2% |
| 1 January 2025 | 43.6% | 62.0% |
| 1 January 2026 | 43.0% | 60.2% |
| 15 November 2026 | 38.6% | 57.6% |
So who took those five points?
Mostly nobody you’d name. Shopify gained 0.4 points this year and Wix stayed flat at 4.2%. The share of sites with no detectable CMS jumped instead, from 28.6% in January to 32.9% now.
Our reading: more sites are custom-built, including ones made with AI app builders. Lovable already shows up on 0.5% of all websites in W3Techs’ list, and v0 on 0.1%. W3Techs gives no reason, and a change in its own detection could move the numbers too. Treat this as a likely cause, not a proven one.
Our take: WordPress isn’t dying. It still runs more sites than every other CMS put together. But if you’re writing “over 40% of the web” in a pitch deck, update it.
Popular sites lean on WordPress less
The busier the site, the smaller WordPress’ lead. W3Techs splits CMS share by traffic rank:
| Sites ranked | WordPress CMS share | Shopify CMS share |
|---|---|---|
| All sites | 57.6% | 8.1% |
| Top 1 million | 47.8% | 15.9% |
| Top 100,000 | 50.2% | 8.4% |
| Top 10,000 | 50.5% | 3.9% |
| Top 1,000 | 49.3% | 5.1% |
WordPress holds about half of every popular tier. Shopify’s share doubles in the top 1 million, because busy stores are its core customers.
Our top-1,000 scan looked stranger. Only 58 of 511 readable homepages ran WordPress, and just two of the top 100: wordpress.org and wordpress.com. Big brands tend to keep WordPress on blog and newsroom subdomains, which a homepage check misses.
Which WordPress versions are sites running?
Two in three WordPress installs run 7.1, the version released on 19 August 2026. That’s from WordPress.org’s own stats, built from every site that checks in for updates.
| WordPress version | Share of installs |
|---|---|
| 7.1 | 66.2% |
| 7.0 | 6.4% |
| 6.9 | 6.1% |
| 6.8 | 4.9% |
| 6.7 | 2.5% |
| 6.0 to 6.6 | 6.6% |
| Older than 6.0 | 7.3% |
That count includes private and staging sites. W3Techs, which sees only public sites, lands close: 69.6% on version 7, 23.8% on version 6, 6.6% older.
In our scan, 81 of 152 WordPress sites hid their version. Of the 71 that showed it, 55 ran 7.1.
Old isn’t the same as unpatched
Here’s the part most version charts get wrong. WordPress still sends security fixes to old branches.
On 28 October 2026 it shipped 7.1.4 along with updates for every older branch, all the way back to 4.7.39. So a site on 5.7.21 has that fix. A site on 7.1.3 doesn’t.
Measured that way, 57 of the 71 sites in our sample (80.3%) ran the latest release of their branch. The 14 that didn’t were mostly on 7.x, one or two point releases behind. That’s what you see when automatic updates have been switched off, because WordPress installs minor releases on its own by default.
Check yours: Open Dashboard, then Updates. If it offers a minor release such as 7.1.4, install it now, then find out what disabled auto-updates. A security plugin or a host setting is the usual suspect.
What PHP and database versions do WordPress sites run?
Eight in ten WordPress installs run PHP 8, yet 31.9% sit on PHP releases with no security support left.
| PHP version | Share of WordPress installs | Security fixes until |
|---|---|---|
| 8.5 | 6.7% | 31 Dec 2029 |
| 8.4 | 11.0% | 31 Dec 2028 |
| 8.3 | 28.0% | 31 Dec 2027 |
| 8.2 | 22.4% | 31 Dec 2026 |
| 8.1 | 9.0% | Ended |
| 8.0 | 3.3% | Ended |
| 7.4 | 14.3% | Ended |
| 7.3 and older | 5.3% | Ended |
Look at the PHP 8.2 row. Its security support ends on 31 December 2026, six weeks from now. If nobody moves, the share of WordPress installs on unsupported PHP jumps from 31.9% to about 54% on 1 January 2027.
Why does old PHP survive? WordPress 7.1 still installs on PHP 7.4, so nothing forces an upgrade. In our scan, 24 WordPress sites leaked their PHP version in a response header, and six of them were on 7.4.
Find yours in Site Health (under Tools), on the Info tab. Most hosts, Hostinger included, let you switch versions from the control panel. Test on a staging copy first: a plugin that can’t handle newer PHP is a classic trigger for the WordPress critical error screen.
Databases are more settled. MariaDB runs 60.8% of reporting installs and MySQL 39.2%. The worry sits at the tail, where 11.9% still use MySQL 5.7 and 3.5% MySQL 5.5.
How many WordPress plugins and themes are there?
The official WordPress.org directory lists 75,093 plugins and 8,833 themes. Commercial ones sold elsewhere, such as Divi, aren’t in those counts.
A few plugins run on millions of sites. WordPress.org rounds these active-install figures down:
| Plugin | Active installs | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Elementor | 10 million+ | Drag-and-drop page builder |
| Yoast SEO | 10 million+ | SEO titles, sitemaps, schema |
| Contact Form 7 | 10 million+ | Contact forms |
| Classic Editor | 8 million+ | Brings back the pre-block editor |
| LiteSpeed Cache | 7 million+ | Caching on LiteSpeed servers |
| WooCommerce | 7 million+ | Online store |
| Wordfence | 5 million+ | Firewall and malware scanner |
| Rank Math | 4 million+ | SEO titles, sitemaps, schema |
Classic Editor’s 8 million installs stand out: millions of sites still refuse the block editor years after it became the default. Our WordPress SEO plugins roundup compares the two SEO plugins on this list.
Our scan undercounts plugins, because many load nothing on the homepage. The median WordPress homepage showed three. Elementor appeared on 17.8% of WordPress homepages and WooCommerce on 11.2%, against W3Techs’ 31.5% and 19.7% from deeper checks.
Themes told the same story. Hello Elementor, a bare theme made for Elementor builds, led with 15 sites. Astra and GeneratePress followed with six each. If you’re deciding whether to build that way, our Elementor review covers the trade-offs.
Where is WordPress used? The language data
Only 42.6% of WordPress installs run in US English, so the majority speak something else.
| Site language | Share of installs |
|---|---|
| English (US) | 42.6% |
| Japanese | 6.0% |
| Spanish (Spain) | 5.7% |
| German | 5.7% |
| French (France) | 4.6% |
| Portuguese (Brazil) | 3.8% |
Japanese in second place surprises people. For plugin makers the lesson is blunt: ship without translations and you skip most of the market.
How we checked these numbers (and what we didn’t)
We pulled every figure ourselves on 15 November 2026. Nothing is copied from another stats roundup.
- Market share and trends: W3Techs’ live reports. It watches the top 10 million sites and refreshes every day, so figures drift by tenths of a point.
- Versions, PHP, databases and languages: WordPress.org’s public stats feeds, which count every install that checks for updates. PHP end-of-support dates come from the PHP project.
- Plugins and themes: the WordPress.org directory, for totals and active installs.
- Our scan: 2,000 domains from the Tranco ranking dated 12 November 2026. That’s the top 1,000, plus 1,000 picked at random below rank 10,000. We fetched each homepage once and looked for WordPress files, the generator tag and plugin and theme paths.
What we didn’t do: check inner pages, subdomains or logged-in areas, or test any site for real vulnerabilities. In the random sample, 369 sites gave us nothing to read. No reply, an error, a bot wall or an empty page all count, and those sites are left out of every percentage.
A sample this size also carries a margin of error of a few points. Read our scan as a cross-check, not a census. We used the same method for our web hosting statistics report, which covers who hosts these sites.
What these WordPress numbers mean for your site
Three of these numbers should change what you do this month:
- The 19.7% behind on updates. Not on the latest point release of your branch? Fix that first. It’s free and closes known holes.
- The 22.4% on PHP 8.2. Move to PHP 8.3 or 8.4 before 31 December. Plan a staging test, not a Friday-night switch.
- The five-point drop. It’s no reason to leave. WordPress still has the biggest pool of plugins, themes and developers, and our guide to installing WordPress gets you running in an afternoon.
Rather not babysit updates and PHP at all? WordPress.com handles both on its managed plans, at the cost of some plugin freedom on cheaper tiers. If you stay self-hosted, a good WordPress security plugin is the next thing to add.
Disclosure: some links on this page are affiliate links. We may earn a commission at no extra cost to you.
Frequently asked questions
How many websites use WordPress?
Nobody knows the exact count. W3Techs publishes percentages of the top 10 million sites, not totals. Netcraft counted about 1.47 billion hostnames in September 2026, but many are parked or empty. Multiplying the two gives a big, wrong number, so be wary of any exact WordPress site count you read.
Are WordPress.com sites included in WordPress statistics?
Yes. W3Techs and similar crawlers detect the WordPress software itself, not who hosts it. A blog on WordPress.com and a self-hosted site on your own server count the same way. None of the public surveys split the two, so there’s no reliable figure for how many sites WordPress.com hosts.
Does hiding the WordPress version make a site safer?
Barely. Removing the generator tag hides the version from casual checks, but the same number often shows up in script and stylesheet links. Most attack bots skip the version check anyway and fire known exploits at every site they find. Staying on the latest point release protects you far more than hiding which one you run.
How often do WordPress statistics change?
Constantly, but slowly. W3Techs updates daily, and shares move by a few tenths of a point a month. Version figures shift faster: WordPress 7.1 went from release to two-thirds of installs in under three months. Always put the date next to any WordPress statistic you quote.
What PHP version should a WordPress site use in 2026?
PHP 8.3 or 8.4 is the safe choice right now. Both get security fixes into 2027 and 2028, and they’ve been out long enough for popular plugins to catch up. PHP 8.5 is newer, so test it on staging first, because older plugins break on it more often.
What is the most popular WordPress theme?
In the official directory, Twenty Twenty-Five, Hello Elementor and Astra each show more than a million active installs. Paid themes sold outside the directory, like Divi, aren’t counted there. On the live homepages we scanned, Hello Elementor was the most common theme, followed by Astra and GeneratePress.
Where can I check WordPress statistics myself?
WordPress.org publishes live version, PHP, database and language shares as free data feeds at api.wordpress.org/stats. W3Techs’ CMS pages are free to read. For a single site, view the page source and search for wp-content, which shows WordPress and usually the theme and plugins too.
The bottom line
The honest WordPress statistics for 2026 come down to two shares: 38.6% of the web and 57.6% of the CMS market. Both are down from 2025, and WordPress is still far ahead of Shopify and Wix.
If you run a WordPress site, the numbers that matter are yours: the release you’re on and your PHP version. If you’re quoting these figures, date them and say which share you mean. Your next step: open Site Health and check both today.
