WordPress Powers a Quarter of the Internet: W3Techs Web Analysis Unveiled

Boasting the latest intriguing web trends and technologies, we bring to you the newest round-up of statistics released by W3Techs. This compilation presents an insightful overview of topics ranging from content management systems to popular image file formats.

Let’s delve into a developmental platform that, as of this month, controls an impressive 25% of all websites – WordPress. The well-respected platform has bounded into the stratosphere of web technologies with a 58.7% share among known content management systems. Born a mere 12 years ago, WordPress has successfully managed to emerge as a leading-edge internet power house. It has left its competitors in the dust, with the second most popular content management system, Joomla, holding a much smaller market share of 2.8%.

Source: W3Techs

Those who may wonder how W3Techs manages to extract such accurate statistics amidst hundreds of millions of websites, the answer lies in diligent web analysis. In this study, W3Techs analysed around 10 million sites based on popularity, as per the Alexa ranking, to accumulate these data points.

Moving to image formats, the most used and favoured image format stands out to be JPEG with an overwhelming 71.6% usage. Hot on JPEG’s heels is PNG, trailing by a trivial 3.2% but noted as the fastest growing image format in the market, according to the report.

Server-side programming languages see a continuation of dominance by PHP, securing a staggering 81.5% usage. The distant follower in this arena is ASP.NET, possessing a 16.2% share. Impressively, PHP is also the fastest growing server-side programming language, with JavaScript playing catch-up.

For traffic analysis tools, Google Analytics leads the pack with 52.9% usage, while WordPress Stats and Yandex.Metrika fall in closely with 4.1% and 4.6% usage respectively. The presence of WordPress Stats in the list is anticipated, considering the remarkable fact that one fourth of websites today are powered by WordPress. An increasing number of users are leveraging the WordPress Mobile app to analyze traffic to their sites.

Earlier in the year, a report from security firm Securi surfaced pertaining to the vulnerabilities of WordPress users. The findings revealed that any WordPress Plugin or theme that leverages the genericons package is susceptible to a DOM-based Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) vulnerability due to an unsecured file included with genericons. Leading security concerns, plugins like JetPack (with over 1 million active installs) and the default-installed theme, TwentyFifteen, were found thus susceptible. This consequently warranted a warning to hosting companies such as GoDaddy from WordPress.