WordPress Now Powers 30% of Websites

WordPress now powers 30 percent of the web, according to data from web technology survey firm W3Techs. From a report: This represents a 5 percentage point increase in nearly two and a half years, after WordPress hit the 25 percent mark in November 2015. It's worth noting here that this figure relates to the entire Web, regardless of whether a website uses a content management system (CMS) or not. If we're looking at market share, WordPress actually claims 60.2 percent, up from 58.7 percent in November 2015. By comparison, its nearest CMS rival, Joomla, has seen its usage jump from 2.8 percent to 3.1 percent, while Drupal is up from 2.1 percent to 2.2 percent.

"The carbon cost of..."

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Since Bitcoin seems to be in the cross hairs for how many CPU cycles it wastes, has anyone computed what Wordpress environmental impact is?

How many countries power grids does it take to serve all of the Wordpress sites in the world? How many people actually need a fully dynamic website?

I'm glad to see that static site generators are making a comeback. I have more than enough computing power in a $5 VPS to host nginx serving static content.

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[DaMattster]

Since Bitcoin seems to be in the cross hairs for how many CPU cycles it wastes, has anyone computed what Wordpress environmental impact is?

How many countries power grids does it take to serve all of the Wordpress sites in the world? How many people actually need a fully dynamic website?

I'm glad to see that static site generators are making a comeback. I have more than enough computing power in a $5 VPS to host nginx serving static content.

Few people need a fully dynamic website. It is actually not hard at all to update a static one periodically for a small business. For dynamic content like blogging, there is a great platform called Ghost at http://www.ghost.org/ [ghost.org] where you can simply use an sqlite database for your blog content. I do this.

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[lactose99]

Hell, just use Grav, https://getgrav.org/ [getgrav.org], uses Markdown in flat-files. No DB necessary.

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[old_skul]

I run a pair of Wordpress sites on a Raspberry Pi 2. 5W of power draw. I do need some of the dynamic features of Wordpress for one of the sites, but for both of them, it's mostly just a glorified CMS.

I'm pretty sure my carbon footprint for those sites is less than my total amount of flatulence in a year.

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[TechyImmigrant]

1W is roughly the energy imparted to you head from an apple falling on it from 1 meter above.
So you 5W power draw is roughly the equivalent of 5 apples per second falling on your head from 1 meter above.

That would get old quickly.

WordPress should cache to static

[raymorris]

99% of WordPress sites should be set to cache the HTML produced for several minutes, so performance wise it's almost like a static site. There are multiple good ways to do thag. If you have a WordPress site and haven't done that, it's definitely something to look in to.

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[dgatwood]

Which means that should be the default behavior. Actually, the default should probably involve caches measured in days, with some sort of automatic purge-on-modification, but I have no idea if WP supports that.

The problem with WordPress isn't that it can't be a good citizen, but rather that by default (which is how probably 99% of site admins leave it configured), it is an abusive nightmare. :-)

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[h33t l4x0r]

Yeah but then you have to turn off the cache every time you need to troubleshoot an issue, and likely forget to turn it back on once it's resolved.

Auto undebug

[raymorris]

I've done that enough times that sometimes I do something like:

debug = on if date() 2018-03-07

Or more frequently:
debug = on if REMOTE_ADDR == '36.73.26.37'

Also I'll use the "at" command to turn the firewall back on or whatever.

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[Bryansix]

The amount of false assumptions about wordpress you make is staggering. The site does almost nothing when people are not requesting pages. Even when they are, most pages get pulled from a cache which is probably more energy efficient than a static website hitting the disk every time.

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[h33t l4x0r]

My Wordpress clients all have the same idea that the more plugins they install and activate, the more awesome their website will be. Then they complain that their site is too slow. *Sigh*.

Misleading

[SumDog]

Isn't it 30% of blogs sites? (i.e Drupal, Blogger, Ghost, etc.) This type of statistic has come up before and it just doesn't really hold up. It just doesn't make any sense when you look at the sheer number of websites with custom content management engines or which use big commercial software like CQ, Teamsite, etc.

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[Anonymous Coward]

Unfortunately no, it's 60% of websites using a CMS at all according to the source.

https://w3techs.com/technologies/overview/content_management/all

WordPress

[DaMattster]

IMHO, WordPress is the Windows of the CMS world. It is a frighteningly poor security record and it is just bloated and not admin friendly at all. If you need a good blogging platform, check out Ghost at http://www.ghost.org./ [www.ghost.org] Rather than using PHP, Ghost uses Node.js. Ghost is also much easier to create themes for. Furthermore, Ghost is leaner and uses markdown language for blogging.

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[Greger47]

I'd go even further and call it the Visual Basic of CMSes.

It's a playground for amateurs, and I'm amazed every time I see a well known business or organisation using it.

WordPress quickly degenerates into a mess of plugins and crappy hacks to do any remotely useful content management outside of a banal blog.

- greger

Wrong. (Disclaimer: I do LAMP & WP for a livin

[Qbertino]

IMHO, WordPress is the Windows of the CMS world. It is a frighteningly poor security record and it is just bloated and not admin friendly at all.

I hate to break the news to you, but WordPresses Security Track record is actually pretty good, despite being an unbelievable hodgepodge of spagetticode (initially) built by amateurs. It powers north of 130 million websites and the last critical security breach managed to infect 8000 websites before it was fixed and contained. That is less than 0.002 percent of the live installbase. I don't know any Java system with that could stand such an exposure with so little impact. WP is being worked on day in and day out by a massive army of hobby and professional developers and that makes security breaches way less a problem than with some obscure system that theoretically is more secure but falls flat on it's face when a critical breach takes 10 days or more to fix, let alone to find.

By now most hosters and CDN services have atuned their offerings to the behemoth that is WordPress and can smell attacks on WP from miles away and prevent them before they even happen. In this regard WP actually has an advantage, as it is a popular target and this quickly exposes malicious IP adresses and breach-vectors.

As for being admin friendly: This is where WP shines, at least in the Dashboard. No other system is so easyly adopted by n00bs than WordPress. Any dimwit can operate an WP installation within 5 minutes of catching the first glimpse of it. Coding an extension or a template for WP is a walk in the park compared to anything else out there - which is a) why it's so damn popular and b) there is so many plugins that are so unbelievably shoddyly developed it would blow your mind if you looked at the code. And yet any n00b can find a specific task that need to be adressed, whip up some PHP and sell it as a plugin and make some money on the side. Yet another reason it's so popular.

Long story short: If you'd look at WP code alone you'd bet your right arm that this mess has no chance in hell of becoming the worlds leading web cms. But look at the big picture and it's easy to understand why it rules these days. That's also because everything else out there in the PHP space falls way short in comparsion and that sure as hell also goes for this dead-in-the-water Ghost Blog thingie built on top of node that is still a toddler that is wet behind the ears compared to LAMP.

My 2 cents.

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[ecsyle]

Wish I could mod you up!

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[Wraithlyn]

an unbelievable hodgepodge of spagetticode [...] everything else out there in the PHP space falls way short in comparsion

Um.. what? You admit yourself that WP's codebase is garbage, and then claim there's nothing better?

Silverstripe also has a great & intuitive admin UI, and the code is about a million times better, proper MVC OOP with a great extension system that encourages horizontal code reuse (eg composition over inheritance). Our clients and devs all love it to death, it's a joy to work with.

I

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[null etc.]

Silverstripe blows them all away.

Thanks for the recommendation! Every time I'm forced to use WordPress, I feel dirty, as though I'm using some framework that's written by a shadowy gray market powered by child labor and stolen credit cards. The WordPress admin interface is amongst the worst I've seen, and the "ecosystem" and marketplace of plugins is mostly garbage riddled with gaping security holes.

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[Wrath0fb0b]

As for being admin friendly: This is where WP shines, at least in the Dashboard. No other system is so easyly adopted by n00bs than WordPress. Any dimwit can operate an WP installation within 5 minutes of catching the first glimpse of it

This is exactly it. The promise of technology that I remember from the 90s was that anyone would be able to stand up a simple static website for their antique store or tractor repair shop without becoming domain experts in LAMP. These aren't necessarily dumb people (although some are pretty dim), but they are fairly ignorant of all things tech related.

Instead, some forces appear to have pushed us into a place where many organizations feel overwhelmed and either hire contractors (which turn out the same garb

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[AmiMoJo]

I've been looking at setting up a WP site for a friend who owns a hotel. Getting a basic site with a nice theme and some content is fine, but he wants a booking system too. Being a small hotel he can't really justify spending a lot on the big commercial solutions. At the moment he manages bookings via email and a spreadsheet.

Any suggestions for that kind of thing?

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[Aethedor]

I totally agree that Wordpress is a 'hodgepodge of spagetticode'. The only way I've used Wordpress in the past is during my courses Secure Web Development, to show students how not to write code. After so many patches, Wordpress' code may be secure. But what makes it insecure is that it doesn't provide a solid base for plugin developers. It doesn't support, encourage or enforce plugin developers to write secure plugins. So, while many people only blame plugin developers for Wordpress, I also blame Wordpress

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[thegarbz]

If you need a good blogging platform

Define "good". For many people (especially windows users), good means that it's popular, there's the most wealth of material available for it, there's the most support, and that there's the largest community.

ION

[TFlan91]

In other news...

"30% of the website is vulnerable"

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[TFlan91]

whoops....

"30 % of the web is vulnerable"

Interesting but

[bigdavex]

What percent of web traffic is this? Are all these Word Press sites actually visited?

Turnkey systems

[duke_cheetah2003]

This is interesting. A mass deployment of basically a turnkey system. I'm very against any turnkey solutions in computing. Mainly because, since it's turnkey, if anyone finds any vulnerability on any installation of the turnkey, every other installation is also vulnerable.

They might be easier to set up and use, but they're also easier to hack. Some might come back with the argument as a turnkey system, there's a lot of eyes on the code, so that should cut back on vulnerabilities over non-turnkey install