In a milestone event, free and open source blogging platform WordPress has surpassed 50,000,000 installations on websites, and this number is increasing all the time. This milestone comes just over eight years since the initial release of the web software, and just seven days after the release of WordPress 3.2, which has seen 1.2 million downloads so far (and growing at five downloads per second).
WordPress also has some pretty impressive user statistics thanks to the 50 million websites mark. Of the ~25 million WordPress websites that WordPress themselves host, more than 283 million people view over 2.5 billion pages per month. WordPress.com users altogether create 400,000 new comments on average per day and 500,000 new posts, of which around two thirds are English. Also, WordPress likes to remind its users that many major websites use WordPress as a content management system (CMS), including TechCrunch, UPS, NBC Sports and CNN.
Matt Mullenweg, founder and creator of the WordPress software back in 2003, had this to say about the major milestone on his blog:
It’s always fun to pass a big round number and over the weekend many libations were consumed with friends old and new, but ultimately the press has always been more concerned with those top-line numbers than we have in the WordPress community. More sites being created is a good benchmark for our adoption, but ultimately WordPress matters not for the blogs it creates but for the lives it affects.
Currently, WordPress is used by around 14% of the top 1,000,000 websites worldwide.