WordPress Statistics

83,678free themes and plugins tracked in the WordPress.org directory, counted here every night

WordPress runs 41.2% of the web, but core is only the floor of it — what people actually build with is the directory below and the commercial market on top of it. This page is that whole ecosystem at a glance: what is published, what it runs on, and how much of it has quietly been abandoned.

WordPress over time

Live WordPress sites detected across the web. Points up to 9 Aug 2026 are BuiltWith Trends readings, used with permission; from 9 Aug 2026 on it is our own daily capture. BuiltWith read irregularly, so the points are unevenly spaced — the axis is proportional to time, not to reading number.

+3,958,583 sites (+11.9%) since we started counting.

A falling share of the web and a falling number of sites are not the same thing: the web keeps growing, so a share can slide while the count rises. The chart above is the count, which is the part we can measure ourselves. For the share, see the W3Techs figure below — it is theirs, not ours.

Live sites detected by BuiltWith across the eight platforms we track. Not a market share — there are more CMSes than these, and sites running none of them. WordPress is 58.4% of this group.

The WordPress.org directory

Every free theme and plugin in the directory, scanned nightly by this site. Last scan 2026-09-12

Themes

In the directory: 15,206
Active installs: 11.8M
All-time downloads: 772.8M
Authors: 3,103
Average rating: 4.8★
Abandoned: 6,546 43%

Full themes statistics →

Plugins

In the directory: 68,472
Active installs: 325.3M
All-time downloads: 15.5B
Authors: 38,285
Average rating: 4.6★
Abandoned: 31,741 46%

Full plugins statistics →

Authors

Across both directories: 40,191
Publish plugins only: 37,088
Publish themes only: 1,906
Ship both: 1,197
One-item authors: 71%
Top-10 install share: 35%

Full author statistics →

38,287 of the 83,678 themes and plugins in the directory (46%) have had no update in over two years. They stay installable, they stay in search results, and nothing on WordPress.org marks them.

What WordPress actually runs on

Reported by every WordPress install that checks in for updates, published by WordPress.org. Mirrored here daily — last read 2026-09-12. Shares are of all reporting installs.

WordPress 7.x

68.1%

the most-installed major line

PHP 8.x

77.1%

the most common PHP line

On supported PHP

73%

PHP 8.1 or newer — the rest get no security fixes

MariaDB 10.x

34.8%

the most common database

English (US)

42.6%

the most common site language

WordPress versions

7.x68.1%
6.x24.1%
5.x5.2%
4.x2.3%
3.x0.3%

PHP versions

8.x77.1%
7.x20.8%
5.x2.1%

Databases

MariaDB 10.x34.8%
MariaDB 11.x24.6%
MySQL 8.x22.4%
MySQL 5.x17.5%
MariaDB 5.x0.3%
MariaDB 12.x0.3%

Site languages

English (US)42.6%
Japanese6%
Spanish (Spain)5.8%
German5.7%
French (France)4.6%
Portuguese (Brazil)3.9%

WordPress against the rest of the web

These are the only numbers on this page we did not measure. They come from other people’s crawls of the whole web, which is not something this site does, so each one is dated and linked to its source. Read on 10 August 2026 (33 days ago).

41.2%of all websitesrun WordPress — down 0.3 points this monthW3Techs · 2026-08-10 ↗

59.1%of the CMS marketamong sites whose CMS is known — down 0.1W3Techs · 2026-08-10 ↗

8.2%of all websitesrun WooCommerceW3Techs · 2026-08-09 ↗

Share of all websites

WordPress41.2%
Shopify5.3%
Wix4.3%
Squarespace2.5%
Joomla1.2%
Webflow0.8%
Duda0.7%
Drupal0.7%

Where these numbers come from

Figures	Source	How often	Last read
Directory counts, installs, downloads, ratings, abandonment	WordPress.org theme & plugin APIs ↗	Nightly, by this site	2026-09-12
WordPress, PHP, database and locale shares	WordPress.org statistics API ↗	Daily, by this site	2026-09-12
Share of the web, live site counts	W3Techs ↗	Checked by hand	2026-08-10

A longer write-up of the wider WordPress numbers — adoption by country, the commercial market, release history — lives in WPZOOM’s WordPress statistics roundup.