WordPress Trends & Popularity
In 2003 I started looking for a better way to manage my growing spinal cord injury news article website, The Spinal Cord Injury Zone. At the time I was using Dreamweaver to manage the 50+ page website. After trying several Content Mangement Systems (CMS) I decided to use WordPress, a blogging software. WordPress was just released and mainly being used for blogs but I could see the underlying foundation of a great CMS. I quickly feel in love with WordPress and the simplicity of adding new posts fueled the growth of The Spinal Cord Injury Zone, which just passed 3,600 articles. A website that size would be a nightmare to manage with Dreamweaver alone.
After 10 years of impressive updates, WordPress is no longer just used for blogging. WordPress is now used by more than 18% of the top 10 million websites. 22 out of every 100 new active domains in the US are running WordPress. Since 2003 I have used WordPress for almost every web project I have been involved with.
This infographic, explores some interesting Google Search Trends around WordPress and its ecosystem. By exploring the popularity of search terms over the last decade, we can gain a deeper understanding of the rise and fall in popularity of certain systems, and use those results to shape our understanding of how the web has changed, and how things will continue to change in the foreseeable future.
Analyzing The Infographic
WordPress Alone
Since 2004, there has been steady growth in searches for WordPress. We can only predict that this will continue to rise as WordPress advances as a CMS and Application Platform.
Templates vs. Themes
In October 2007, search relevancy for WordPress Theme surpassed that of Website Template from an extreme increase in WordPress themes being developed, making web templates a thing of the past.
The CMS Race
Comparing WordPress to other top CMS’s such as Drupal and Joomla, makes WordPress a clear winner. In September 2009, searches for Drupal and Joomla climaxed, while WordPress continued to grow in popularity.
A Bright Future
An interesting comparison is between the search relevancy of Website and WordPress. Sometime in the near future, we may see these two search terms come close to one in the same.
Source: ElegantThemes.com