The chances that you have heard about WordPress are big as it is probably the most popular website management and blogging system out there, with more than 60 million websites being supported by it. Created by Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little, it was introduced on May 27th, 2003 and since then 32 other versions have been released. An interesting fact is that every version that has been named after a certain jazz artist (Miles Davis, Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, Oscar Peterson, just to name several) as WordPress core developers state that they “share a love of jazz music”. The idea of the creators was to associate the software with a printing press, referring to reporters, journalists, columnists, photographers as the press, so the name WordPress was coined by Christine Tremoulet.
Another fun fact is that it didn’t have a logo until 2005 when Santa Maria designed the famous ‘W’ logo.
Almost half of the top 1 million websites in the world are created with WordPress (49%), whereas a mere 5% use Drupal and an even lower 3% use Joomla, which are the closest competitors that WordPress has.
WordPress developer was the most requested job qualification in the world in 2014, and in order to be more accessible to more people around the globe, WordPress is available in more than 72 languages. It has more than 50,000 plugins which allow all web designers and owners plenty of custom functions and features so they can create the desired look of their website or blog.
The list of brands and businesses which use WordPress to power their websites is quite long and it includes giants like: The New York Times, Samsung, eBay Inc., Forbes, Sony, Coca-Cola, etc. The most profitable WordPress companies are Automattic with a revenue of $1.2 billion, Envato with $94 million, and, of course, WPEngine with a revenue of $73 million.
TechCrunch for $30 million, Bankaholic for $15 million, Deadline Hollywood for $14 million, and Wonkette for $12 million are some of the websites powered by WordPress that were sold for huge sums of money.
The facts above show us why WordPress has become the leading open source tool to create a webpage or a blog, used by millions of people and companies in the world.
This excellent infograpic illustrates up to 51 amazing fact you probably did not know about wordpress, so feel free to check it out.
