I spent last weekend with 350 fellow WordPress users and developers at the second annual WordCamp Sacramento. WordCamps are organized by local hosts and supported by Automattic, the WordPress parent company. Because of this local focus, the presenters aren’t all as polished as they are at many other developer’s conferences but they are no less knowledgeable and willing to share with the larger community. I picked up many useful insights from the 30 presentations over two days, that will be put to good use on my clients' websites.

WordPress is uniquely well suited as a Content Management System (CMS) for small businesses and organizations. It has also become insanely popular. Nick Schäferhoff has been tracking WordPress statistics since 2014. Here are a few from his recent blog post, 13 Surprising WordPress Statistics (Updated 2016):

• WordPress powers almost 27% of the entire internet. With more than one billion sites online today, you do the math. Its market share among CMS is close to 60%. The second most popular CMS (Joomla) is used by only 6.3%.
• WordPress 4.6 has been downloaded 21.7 million times. The same software that powers WordPress.com can be freely downloaded for use in “self-hosted” installations. It’s this software that I and my fellow WordCamp attendees use to build websites for every purpose imaginable.
• There are more than 47,000 WordPress plugins. These software modules extend the capabilities of WordPress so that each site can match the needs of its owner. The internal structure of WordPress allows and encourages the creation of these plugins and the developer community has responded in force.
• WordPress sites around the world publish 24 posts per second. And this only counts sites hosted on WordPress.com or self-hosted sites with the Jetpack plugin installed. As a result of all that activity, WordPress sites receive 22.17 billion monthly pageviews.
• 25% of WordPress users surveyed make a full-time living off of the CMS. WordPress provides a fertile ecosystem for businesses such as mine to provide client services, make a living for ourselves and contribute to our local economies.
• 89 WordCamps in 34 countries with more than 21,000 participants in 2015. From the WordCamp Central website: “WordCamps come in all different flavors, based on the local communities that produce them, but in general, WordCamps include sessions on how to use WordPress more effectively, beginning plugin and theme development, advanced techniques, security, etc.” Last weekend, there were six other WordCamps around the world, in addition to the one in Sacramento.
• WordPress is most popular with businesses, least popular with news sites. Among the top one million websites in the world, the lion’s share of those powered by WordPress are related to business. They greatly outnumber news sites, where the usage of WordPress is least popular. Given the fact that the online marketing world raves about WordPress, this is not all that surprising.

As I said last week, I like working with companies that take a stand. Automattic has made a commitment to building an open source, community driven software platform and supporting those who have chosen to use it. As long as they continue in that direction, its popularity and utility will only continue to grow.

Until next week...