Right before LiveJournal there was MovableType and when MT crashed and burned because they changed their license terms to be less open source, WordPress took off. That moment was when the road forked into social media vs open source publishing on WordPress. Almost 20 years later WP is 40% of the Web for anyone who cares to pull their heads out of their favorite walled garden to take a look.
> Almost 20 years later WP is 40% of the Web for anyone who cares to pull their heads out of their favorite walled garden to take a look.
I wonder if anyone has ever critically evaluated the methodology used by W3Techs [1][2]:
> We investigate technologies of websites, not of individual web pages. If we find a technology on any of the pages, it is considered to be used by the website.
> We do not consider subdomains to be separate websites. For instance, sub1.example.com and sub2.example.com are considered to belong to the same site as example.com. That means for example, that all the subdomains of wix.com, wordpress.com and similar sites are counted only as one website.
So if Microsoft has a wp.subsite.microsoft.com subdomain, W3Techs considers WordPress as part of the technologies that Microsoft uses.
What that statistic means is that nearly 40% of business card websites and similar sites use Wordpress. Itβs nowhere near as significant as some people seem to think it is.
Personal blogs are a vanishingly small fraction of that. The only reason it might seem otherwise is due to social bubbles or interest bubbles.
It remains the clear front-runner, with no close competition, for most any site that'll be run by non-geeks, unless you're hosting on a managed platform with its own (closed) content management system. Exception for certain narrow use cases that are well-served by special-purpose software, but it's broadly true. That includes use cases well beyond personal blogs and business card sites.
