WordPress powers about a third of all websites.
How WordPress grew from a 2003 fork of b2/cafelog into the CMS behind a huge share of the web — and where Flex uses it for clients today.
As per wordpress.org, WordPress alone is responsible for powering at least 45% of the world’s websites. This free open-source content management system (CMS) has gained such popularity that the term “WordPress” has become a household word among everyday people.
01 · Origins
On May 27, 2003, WordPress was released by its creators, American developer Matt Mullenweg, and British developer Mike Little, as a fork of the popular blogging program b2/cafelog, and is licensed under the GPLv2 (or later) license.
They probably didn’t know that they were about to start a journey that would eventually benefit millions of users around the globe, and that a whole industry of thousands of developers, designers, writers, bloggers, and web publishers would make their living off it.
02 · Scale
The latest version of WordPress 2.0 was released in December 2005, which had a new admin area. This was a complete overhaul of the WordPress administration screens. With this new release, WordPress was with 50000 downloads. Almost fifteen years later, the best-known CMS of all time powers over a third of all websites, with the latest version being downloaded 14 million times (in less than a month).
The number of websites powered by WordPress is large, ranging from small local businesses to some of the biggest brands in the world such as Disney, BBC America, and Bloomberg. It is not just the ease of use that has attracted users but also features like Gutenberg and the AMP plugin that promise greater autonomy and efficiency when dealing with one’s content.
In fact, we at Flex use WordPress as well – both for our own site and for many of our clients’ sites. If you have any questions about WordPress or CMS in general, you can contact us. We’ll be able to help you with your content management needs.
03 · Notable WordPress sites
Corporations or businesses
Publications
- The New Yorker
- Time Inc.
- BBC America
- Venture Beat
- Bloomberg
Nonprofits
Higher education
- Princeton University
- Cornell University
- MIT
Associations and foundations
Government
Vipul J Bhikadiya
Specialize in product engineering, SaaS development, and building scalable digital products from scratch. Worked on products that grew from zero to $1M+ in revenue.
vipul@flexsolutions.co.in