{"id":1018,"date":"2023-05-22T21:15:30","date_gmt":"2023-05-22T21:15:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/milestonesbook.wordpress.com\/?p=1018"},"modified":"2023-05-25T00:04:38","modified_gmt":"2023-05-25T00:04:38","slug":"chapter-11-the-wordpress-economy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wordpress.org\/book\/2023\/05\/chapter-11-the-wordpress-economy\/","title":{"rendered":"The WordPress Economy"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

In 2018, WordPress hit 32% market share. By 2019, WordPress powered 43% of the web, according to Kinsta, so somewhere in that year, WordPress zoomed past one-third of the web on its way to nearly half of all the CMS-based websites in the universe.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Among key competitors in this space, Joomla was at 3.1% in 2018 and 2.9% in 2019. Drupal went from 2.2% to 1.9%.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Wix and Squarespace both grew their market share in those years, but by 2019 they hit just 1.1% and 1.5%, respectively.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

WordPress had clearly become the most popular website platform, and its market share has only grown since then.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/a>Economic Effects<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

In terms of Economics, what does this popularity mean? As WordPress sought to democratize publishing, making it easier than ever before to build highly functional websites, it opened doors to the online economy for millions of people. Barriers to entry fell for e-commerce, monetized blogging, lead generation, brand awareness websites, and many more creative opportunities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 2018 and 2019, traditional hand-coded websites were still in the majority, but by 2021 WordPress surpassed them. In 2018-2019, as is still true now, the use of WordPress dwarfed the use of all other content management systems combined. According to WPEngine\u2019s Study of the WordPress Economy, the WordPress-enabled economy reached $596.7 billion early in 2021.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIf WordPress were a country,\u201d the WPEngine report<\/a> claims, \u201cits economy would rank 39th in the world.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In a podcast, Josepha listed five groups of people in the WordPress ecosystem:<\/p>\n\n\n\n