How Many Websites Use WordPress in 2026? Usage Statistics

A Quick Overview of WordPress

WordPress started in 2003 as a small blogging platform. Today it powers a huge share of the modern web: personal blogs, small business sites, news portals, online stores, membership platforms, and more.

Flexibility, full control, and a strong open-source community are what drive WordPress’s popularity and the ecosystem’s steady growth — though, as we’ll see below, its market-share growth slowed down in 2026.

How Many Websites Use WordPress in 2026? (Updated Statistics)

If you’re wondering how many websites use WordPress, or what percentage of the web runs on it in 2026, here are the key numbers, verified against W3Techs and independent industry research as of August 2026:

• Roughly 41.2% of all websites on the internet run on WordPress (W3Techs, August 2026).
• That figure is down from a 43.6% peak in mid-2025 — WordPress’s share has now declined for six straight quarters, driven mainly by Shopify and Wix growing faster, not by an actual drop in the number of WordPress sites.
• Among sites running a detectable CMS, WordPress holds roughly a 59% share of the CMS market — far ahead of any single competitor.
• Depending on the study and methodology, WordPress powers somewhere between 480 and 590 million websites.
• About 29-30% of all websites run without any detectable CMS, with the rest split across WordPress, Shopify, Wix, Squarespace, or custom-built systems.
• WordPress’s 6.x series powers over 90% of active WordPress sites (one study found more than 71% of WordPress.org users specifically on version 6.9), meaning most sites are running a modern, actively supported version.

So when people ask “how many WordPress sites are there?” or “what percentage of websites use WordPress?”, the practical answer is: close to half a billion websites, and nearly one in every two sites that use a detectable CMS — though that share has been gradually shrinking over the past year as competing platforms grow.

CMS Market Share in 2026

The latest W3Techs data paints a clear picture. WordPress’s dominance continues, though its share is gradually eroding:

Compared with early 2025, the overall picture is fairly stable, but between December 2025 and May 2026, WordPress’s share fell from 43.2% to 41.9% — a 1.3-point drop in six months, twice the pace of decline seen across all of 2025. That doesn’t mean the number of WordPress sites is falling — it just means other platforms are growing faster.

Historical Growth: WordPress’s Adoption Trend, 2013–2026

Historical usage data from 2013 through 2026 shows clearly how this content management system gradually became a trusted foundation for new websites — and how that growth started slowing over the past two years.

• On January 1, 2013, WordPress powered roughly 17-18% of all websites on the web.
• By mid-2025, that figure peaked at 43.6%.
• By August 2026, the share had dropped to 41.2% — the sixth consecutive quarter of decline for WordPress’s market share.

The trend over the last two years shows WordPress remains a deeply established platform, but AI-powered website builders (Wix ADI and similar tools) are creating real competition for the first time, especially in the simple business-card-site segment.

How Many WordPress Themes Are There?

When developers or business owners are gauging WordPress’s popularity, one of the first questions is how many themes actually exist.

• The official WordPress.org theme directory formally lists roughly 14,000-15,000 themes, though there’s an interesting nuance here: WordPress.org hides themes that haven’t been updated in 2+ years from browse/search results (they’re still reachable via direct link) — which means the number of themes that are actually browsable and actively maintained drops to around 8,000-8,500.
• ThemeForest offers roughly 12,000 premium WordPress themes across various niches.
• Independent theme shops and custom-theme authors push the combined total to well over 30,000.

The upshot is that most projects can start with a battle-tested theme (Hello Elementor, Astra, Divi, GeneratePress, or Newspaper, for example) and customize it, rather than building everything from scratch.

The Most Popular WordPress Themes

Analyses of the top 1 million websites (BuiltWith’s data, for instance) tend to show the same familiar names among active themes:

• Hello Elementor
• Astra
• Divi
• GeneratePress
• Newspaper

On ThemeForest, longtime bestsellers — Avada, The7, BeTheme, Enfold, Flatsome, and others — continue to sell well. Their popularity comes down to regular updates, a large user base, and plenty of ready-made elements. Interestingly, block themes now account for nearly half of new theme submissions to the directory, but they still make up only about 8% of actual active installs — classic themes remain firmly dominant in practice.

How Much Does a WordPress Theme Cost?

WordPress theme pricing remains competitive in 2026:

• You can start with a free theme if budget is tight.
• Most premium themes cost somewhere in the $10-$200 range, averaging around $59.
• Theme “clubs” and membership packages average around $145 a year, depending on the number of sites and products included.
• Lifetime licenses average $250-$300 and pay off especially well if you’re building several WordPress projects a year.

How Many WordPress Plugins Are There in 2026?

If you’re asking “how many plugins are in the WordPress directory in 2026?” — the ecosystem here is just as massive:

• The official WordPress plugin repository now holds over 70,000 free plugins.
• CodeCanyon and similar marketplaces add thousands more premium plugins on top of that.
• WooCommerce.com, Codester, CodeGrape, YITH, and countless independent developers distribute thousands more paid plugins.

In practice, that means the total number of WordPress plugins very likely exceeds 90,000, and keeps growing.

The Most Popular WordPress Plugins

Some plugins show up on almost every WordPress site, since they solve problems nearly everyone runs into — design, forms, SEO, caching, backups, security, and so on. Several plugins in the official repository have 5-10+ million active installs, including:

• Elementor
• Contact Form 7
• Yoast SEO
• Classic Editor
• WooCommerce
• Akismet
• WPForms
• LiteSpeed Cache
• All-in-One WP Migration
• Wordfence Security

These numbers show that WordPress’s popularity isn’t built on core alone — the real strength is in the plugin ecosystem, which lets you add almost any functionality without writing custom code.

How Many Websites Use WooCommerce?

WooCommerce is one of the main reasons many businesses choose WordPress over closed SaaS platforms. It’s worth separating two different figures that often get conflated:

• Per W3Techs, roughly 8.8% of all websites have WooCommerce installed (this includes inactive and test installations).
• Looking specifically at active, genuinely operating online stores, independent tracker Store Leads (August 2026) counts roughly 4.08 million active online stores running WooCommerce — making it the world’s most widely used ecommerce platform by store count, ahead of Shopify (roughly 3.06 million stores).

So when you’re wondering how many WordPress sites are specifically used as online stores, WooCommerce remains the world’s most widely used ecommerce solution — measured by the actual, active number of stores.

Conclusion: What This WordPress Data Actually Shows

Updated WordPress statistics for 2026 paint a fairly clear picture:

• WordPress powers roughly 41% of all websites and nearly 60% of CMS-powered sites — though that share has been gradually declining for six straight quarters, driven mainly by growth at Wix and Shopify.
• There are hundreds of millions of active WordPress sites, supported by tens of thousands of themes and 90,000+ plugins.
• WooCommerce powers over 4 million active online stores and remains the ecommerce platform leader by store count.

For a new project, this means building on WordPress remains a safe, long-term-justified choice. You get a battle-tested platform, an enormous community of developers, and an ecosystem that’s grown steadily for years — while retaining full control over your content, hosting, and SEO strategy. The recent dip in market share says more about growing competition than about any weakness in the platform itself.

“Code is poetry.”

– Matt Mullenweg, co-founder of WordPress (WordPress’s official tagline)