Nathan Wrigley: [00:00:00] So the WP podcast, bringing you the latest news from the WordPress community. Welcome your hosts, David Waumsley, Nathan Wrigley.
Hello there, and welcome to the WP Builds podcast. Once again, this is episode number 236 entitled N is for numbers. It was published on Thursday, the 1st of July, 2021, my name's Nathan Wrigley. And just before we start the show, a few bits of housekeeping as we usually. If you're interested in the podcast and you would like to find out more about the content that we create the best way to do that is to go to our website.
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Today's podcast episode 236 N is four numbers. Now this genuinely is a really interesting episode. It's not really any we've done before, because we just went out and scoured the internet for any fact, which was to do with WordPress. How many installs does it have, which is the most popular plugin.
How many word camps are there? How many themes are there? And there's absolutely boatloads of content in here. It's quite a random episode. It's a bit of a miscellany, but it's really interesting. There's tons to talk about if you enjoyed it and you would like to make some commentary about it. Head over to WP Builds.com.
Search for episode number 236, or perhaps go to WP Builds.com forward slash Facebook. And you could make a comment over there and don't forget our new mastered on instance, WP Builds.social. Please join us over there and let us know what you thought about this episode. I hope that you enjoy.
David Waumsley: [00:04:15] Hello. It's another eight set of WordPress, the series where we attempt to cover all the major aspects of building and maintain these sites with WordPress today is N four numbers.
And when we see numbers, we are really talking about statistics. We've got SEO for S so we've used that one though.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:04:33] Oh, I just thought we were going to list loads of numbers. I thought we were just going to go like 400, 3 72. No, that's not the intention. No,
David Waumsley: [00:04:43] no. Do you have a favorite number? Oh,
Nathan Wrigley: [00:04:46] Ooh. I don't think I do.
Is that normal to people normally have a favorite time?
David Waumsley: [00:04:53] Apparently they do. I don't have one either. Maybe yeah. 20, 23 seems to be my favorite. There was a film about that and it's also my birth date
Nathan Wrigley: [00:05:02] but why, why 23? What's superior about it.
David Waumsley: [00:05:06] I don't know that there's a whole, there is a movie called 23, I think, which talks about the magic of the number 23 and because it's my birth date, so it's going to be mine now.
That's my baby. So I see
Nathan Wrigley: [00:05:17] it is in fact to do with the fact that it was a film. Okay. It's not just some sort of arbitrary number 23. If I had to pick one, it would probably be 42 just because of the Douglas Adams thing, the meaning of life. But honestly, I don't have a favorite number. I didn't even know that was a thing, but I'm glad you have one.
That's good.
David Waumsley: [00:05:36] Yeah. Apparently there's a psychology thing. You could do this trick. If you ask people to pick a number between one and 10, the majority of people will go for seven for some reason. So if you want to pretend you're mind reading, you might just want to jot that down and say, pick a number and then impress them and pull out them.
So
Nathan Wrigley: [00:05:55] we fully are just going to talk about numbers. It was not an exaggeration. That's what this episode is all about. Forget WordPress. We just want to talk about numbers.
David Waumsley: [00:06:07] Oh, gosh, should we move on. So we've got a bunch of stats somewhere and we're going to make this interesting. So we've got some general WordPress stats.
I guess the first one everyone knows really that is presently occupied in 41.6% of the web. As we record this, probably be higher by the time it goes
Nathan Wrigley: [00:06:27] out that is a gigantic number. And I'm sure you're right. As we, as you say, by the time this goes out, give it a day and it will probably creep up by nought 0.1%.
When I joined WordPress, the community, I didn't exit eight, 10 years ago, whatever it was. It was in the mid twenties, I think. So it has really skyrocketed a lot in recent times.
David Waumsley: [00:06:50] Yeah. And also it has this guy over. I could do that either. It's been a roughly that's true. 2% increase throughout his time, which I find fascinating why it is that way.
But it's, I remember Matt Mullenweg saying this maybe about five years ago, because he was worried that it might decline before the whole Gutenberg thing, but no, it's, it seems to be fairly consistent with this 2% for different reasons, yeah.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:07:17] So if we go forward 60 years into the future, WordPress we'll have over a hundred percent of the internet.
If it continues as its normal trajectory, that'll be good. If it has 105% of the internet at that point, we know that the statistics are just broken. How did they close this out though? How is that number arrived at? Do you have any insights.
David Waumsley: [00:07:43] No, not really. And in fact, the one that's always used is a W3C tex.com.
And that's the one that I know Matt Mullenweg goes uses for. He's talking about WordPress. So I don't know where it comes from. Really don't know how it's worked out. No, but the closest competitor is Shopify, which is really growing at 3.6%. So
Nathan Wrigley: [00:08:06] yeah, that's, when you say it's growing in the last few years, it's gone from, I dunno, 2% right up to 3%, because if you think about that, the percentage point move for them is a dramatic change in their proportion of the internet.
If they go from 3% to 5%, they've more than, they've gone like up 60%, whereas WordPress is 2% a year suddenly seems less, less impressive, although it's not
David Waumsley: [00:08:31] yay. Exactly. I mean, over the last we would, we did an episode where it was talking about Shopify and at that point it was over double.
The number of people who were using Shopify in that kind of one year. So the 2020 2021, it's yeah, doubled.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:08:49] That is amazing. And yet, it's less than a 10th of what WordPress has got, but by those metrics, it's a, it's still an impressive, low, the nice thing for the Shopify use, as well as the, there's a revenue stream there, isn't there.
If your if you're a Shopify owner, that site presumably is making you some money, whereas in most cases I'm imagining WordPress sites are not directly making you money because you're probably not selling things. Although obviously Wu is a massive part of the ecosystem now, but yeah. Okay. 42% just about, of the internet.
Massive.
David Waumsley: [00:09:25] Huge. Yeah. Should we talk about the number of automated options?
Nathan Wrigley: [00:09:30] Is that correct? Yeah. Ultimately meaning people who work for automatic that this number is impressive. It's.
David Waumsley: [00:09:38] Yeah, 1,504 at the time of recording this again over 81 countries speaking a hundred different
Nathan Wrigley: [00:09:48] languages. That must get very confusing if they're all talking at the same time, very hard to get anything done.
But look at that at 1500, I'm sure that two years ago, so in 2019 was the last time I came across that number. I'm sure it was 1,100. So by that estimate, it's rising about a hundred a year. And so these are people who are just employed by automatic, which is if you like the custodian of the.com side of things, that's maybe not the best way of describing it, but anyway, there we go.
It's it's a lot of people, but there's some big holes on the map.
David Waumsley: [00:10:28] Yeah, there is, there seems to be literally no one in China, as far as I can see or Thailand or Cambodia, Laos. And few in Russia, in fact, I can't quite work it out. There's an interactive map, which you can go and see if you go to automatic.com and go to the about us, you can see where they are all positioned in.
The, I think it gives their names, does that.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:10:51] Sure. Yeah. But so the majority are in Europe or north America with significant bets. I wonder if the, no one in China, but I wonder if that's a, I wonder if there's policy around that. I wonder if people are are able to be employed by automatic. I honestly don't and I forgive my ignorance.
Yeah.
David Waumsley: [00:11:12] I think there's difficulties, isn't there with the blocks on the internet to be able to work in. So perhaps that's one of the difficulties. Yeah.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:11:21] I, Coke was going to be the destination for WordCamp. And according to your little map, there's no there's nobody in Thailand, so that's intriguing.
David Waumsley: [00:11:31] Actually, I'm completely wrong. Now I'm looking at the map here. See, I'm obviously misreporting this, we do have someone called code Wrangler. Who's set in Thailand and we have someone called happiness engineer who's in Vietnam. So some markers there, they just don't have a face. Okay.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:11:49] Okay. But nevertheless, it's a lot of people and it speaks of a growing a growing company.
Automatic. Yeah, probably.
David Waumsley: [00:12:00] Yeah. But we also have to remember, there's so many acquisitions that automatic have made as well. So they're not all going to be working. WordPress,
Nathan Wrigley: [00:12:08] yeah. Good point. Good point. One is all about languages. This is this statistic about the languages the websites are in.
So it says here 75% are in English, followed by. This is a big drop isn't it? The next one is 4.7%, which would be in Spanish. So the vast majority of websites that are built with WordPress end up being English. And I'm guessing, presumably because multi-lingual plugins are not the most bestselling on the planet.
I'm guessing that they are only in English. Yeah, I,
David Waumsley: [00:12:50] I thought it was interesting given how much Spanish is spoken around the world, but it is quite a low scent and it's Indonesia next at 2.4. So that's really quite, so it, most people are trying to write in English, because of the web, it's just easier to attract more attention.
Isn't it. To get more traffic.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:13:09] I wonder if English use has gone up since the advent of the internet, it feels like it, it has wherever I go, English seems to be the thing that the internet is written in. Obviously that's not the case, but I wonder if it is promoted to the learning of English more than before the internet came.
Yeah.
David Waumsley: [00:13:32] The thing about this statistic, which you query and where it might come from. This is supposed to be from wordpress.com, but I'm not quite sure they've got an activities page, which has got some really interesting statistics on it, but I'm thinking they might have joined together the wordpress.org statistics as well with this.
I don't know. It's just a bit of a guess. Cause it seems a lot. So it says how many people are reading wordpress.com sites and it's over 409 million people and who are viewing more than 20 billion pages each month. That seems like it must be included surely.org. Yeah.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:14:13] That is a lot. That is a lot, but still, the lion's share of it is is in English.
Yeah. Then the next fact you've written down is the salaries of somebody that works in the U S as a WordPress developer.
David Waumsley: [00:14:30] Yeah. So this is a word press developer is expected to work on the average $54,000 per annum. So it's slightly less actually, if we follow that link through, that's a little bit less for designers.
So that's the developers. So it's a 46, 4 designers. And if you're a front end developers stroke engineer, it goes up to a 59. Yeah. Okay.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:15:00] Okay. So the, the the more technical unit. Yeah. The more likely you are to command a higher salary. I want to have that compares to do other things. I don't know, for example, if you are a Laravel developer or you're an expert in react or something like that, I'm imagining WordPress is not particularly well paid in terms of the technology landscape.
I'm sure that there are skills out there which could receive considerably higher remuneration because they're perhaps that they're less to do with websites more to do with, I don't know, SAS apps and all that kind of fun.
David Waumsley: [00:15:37] Yeah, it's very good point. And actually, surely this is going to be changing quite a lot over time because the skills now to work with WordPress a much greater, it's not just PHP any longer as they were learning things like react.
So
Nathan Wrigley: [00:15:54] are we learning things like, I'm sure somebody is, but it's not me at the minute
David Waumsley: [00:16:01] or me. I don't know. Yeah. Yeah, so I'm sure that's going to check that is quite a difficult, all of these statistics are quite difficult, aren't they? These some interpretations. So yeah, there are probably some people who are earning really top money because they really know this react stuff and some of the regular PHP people might be struggling.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:16:20] I guess, I guess that's a fair caveat for everything that we say today is that we're just scraping statistics from the internet and presenting them as actual gospel truth. Whereas we have no idea, but it's fun. It's fun. Regardless. Next one, this is a surprise. I thought the plugin, the number of plugins would be about this point, but I'm surprised that the number of things is as low as it is.
At the time of this, I think we can be sure of, because this is probably an actual number at the time of recording this 58,000 six hundred and seventy four, seventy five, seventy six. It's probably going up like that. Plugins are available on the repo and 8,404 themes. So nearly 60,000 plug-ins and roughly eight and a half thousand themes, which which is I just, for some reason, I thought they would be more parity.
That theme number would be higher than that, but still a lot.
David Waumsley: [00:17:18] Yeah. I guess it's in line with what I would expect actually thinking about it. We'll talk a little bit more about these. Yeah. And the actual player coming up the top in other themes, but yeah. Yeah. So it's more in line with my expectations because so many, there's so many tiny little plugins that do just one simple thing. Various different versions of the same thing. Good
Nathan Wrigley: [00:17:43] point. Yeah. And there really is a plugin for everything. And I wonder how many of those plugins are just sitting there quietly, being consumed by four or five people, maybe 10 people or 50 people, you obviously got the giants that we've all heard of.
They're installed millions of times, but I would imagine most of those 58,000 to, a few here and a few there because they do something specific to what only a few people are going to need. But yeah, there really is a plugin for all, most everything. I was always amazed when I. Come across something that I want to achieve and go and see, has somebody built this already?
And the fast majority of times the answer is a resounding yes. Not only that, but there's eight to choose from.
David Waumsley: [00:18:26] Yeah. And it's the tiny little plugins that makes such a difference to me. So something like zero spam for gravity forms or something really simple little script that it adds. And it's just been invaluable to me.
I love those little plug-ins. Yeah. I think the
Nathan Wrigley: [00:18:40] plugins architecture of WordPress is probably the single thing that allowed it to grow in the way that it did, because it could suddenly do things that you didn't have to create. It could suddenly do things that somebody else had built for you and you either just downloaded it for free, or you paid somebody for the premium version.
Speaking of which presumably about 58,674, doesn't include all of the things which have got no place on the repository. There must be, 10,000 premium ones.
David Waumsley: [00:19:12] Yeah, code canyon must have thousands of plugins that on there. So yeah, let's
Nathan Wrigley: [00:19:17] just call it a hundred thousand. Yeah. There
David Waumsley: [00:19:20] we go. Yeah. I, I really think it must be.
Yeah. Yeah. So let's talk about the word comes. Cause we weren't sure about this. We have to [email protected] and the about, and there was a little chart there which tells us, and we believe now this must be the total sum of word counts that have been, which is 1083 across 65 countries.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:19:44] Yeah.
When I read that, I thought that was, there are 1083 different word camps that you could attend in 65 countries. And then that just, I was like whoa, that really can't be true. So we've got several in the UK, we've got the notable ones. I won't mention any names, but you'll all know this there's a whole bunch here.
I'm sure the same could be said in the United States and presumably places like France and what have you. And it all adds up to 1083, which is a lot. So every time a word camp happens, that number goes up by one no matter where you are in the world, but 65 countries, man, a life that's a lot.
David Waumsley: [00:20:26] Yeah.
Yeah. And then it's still must be growing. I, I attended the first one that was in a part of India, so then there was, I think many of the ones that are in India only been around for a couple of years. They're still quite new there. Growth isn't there in that.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:20:44] Yep. And yeah, I guess that number, that particular number can only keep going up.
It's impossible for it to go down, but I'm still surprised that it's got to a thousand and all of this, the official word camps, bear in mind that there'll be a whole load of much more informal meetups that happen just for one evening each month. Say for example. So we have a word camp meet up in Leeds.
That's the closest one to me that happens. And that's not included in the statistic to be included in this statistic. You go through automatic and it's all official and they will help you with things like, they'll provide finance and provide assistance so that you can actually get it up and running and do the tickets and organize the menus and organize the venue and all of that kind of stuff.
So there's a lot of work over the years, gone into those 1083 word camps. Really a lot of them.
David Waumsley: [00:21:42] Yeah. Okay. Next statistic, I guess this won't be that much of a surprise, but it comes from kingston.com. So I'm not sure how up-to-date this is, but less than one third of all WordPress installations are up to date.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:21:57] That is really surprising, isn't it? Because it prompted both of us to go. And neither of us knew we weren't certain that you could force WordPress. We knew that you could force WordPress to update all the plugins. There's that option has been around for a few months now, but neither of us were aware that you could actually force it to go through major updates as well.
And you can, if you go to the dashboard and click the updates. As a sentence right at the top. And I can't remember what it says. I think I've got it on the screen here. No, I haven't, but there's a sentence which you click on a link and it enables it and it changes the wording of the sentence.
So I was expecting to find a tick box or a toggle or something like that, but there isn't, you literally click on a sentence and it changes the sentence so that you would, if you clicked on it again, it would turn it on and often, but it's not the clearest way of doing it, but you can notice there's no excuse for this is the, but I'm not going to switch it on.
I don't want my, I don't want it to roll onto version six, automatic. I want to be there. When that happens.
David Waumsley: [00:23:01] I have a lot of tests sites, so I'm tempted to do it on that. And what it says is, excuse me, enable automatic updates for all new versions of WordPress and. Connect, if you say yes to that, or click on the link, then it actually changes to switch to automatic updates for maintenance and security releases only.
So that's your two options,
Nathan Wrigley: [00:23:23] but it's not that clear, is it? No. Imagine that would say something like enable automatic updates and there to be a tick box, but you have to read the sentence past the sentence and then click it and realize, okay, now the sentence has the exact opposite. So if I click it again, it's going to go off anyway.
That's completely by the, by the fact is according to this statistic, one-third are only on the latest version and 90%, it goes on 90% of cleanup requests from secure. Who are a a service that you can pay to clean up your WordPress website amongst other things, 90% of their cleanup work comes from WordPress.
And that's the thing that I always hear basically the, the vector for getting, for attacking WordPress is on updated plugins or themes usually.
David Waumsley: [00:24:22] Yeah. Yeah. That's the way it's got to, it's interesting, isn't it? Whether it should be. Whether it should be installed with this automatically turned on.
So updates will happen immediately.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:24:35] I feel that if we've, if that's statistics true, and one third of websites using WordPress are not on the latest update. I kind of feeling that, excuse me, we both got frogs in our throats today. For me, that statistic is a bit low, it ought to be higher.
That is to say less people would need to update. So having that on by default. Don't really know, I think for me, no, but I think for people who really never use their WordPress install, they never log into the backend. And aren't really aware that this is a thing maybe it should be turned on by default so that we have less vulnerabilities out there in the wild, compromising servers and taking websites and other people's websites down.
David Waumsley: [00:25:22] We've been talking about WordPress for five years, you do a weekly news Roundup. And how long have I been? Since 2007, I've been using WordPress and we both had to go and look up whether there was this option to automatically update. So maybe there's an argument. Yeah, yeah. It
Nathan Wrigley: [00:25:40] needs, it feels like it ought to be an installed part of the install wizard.
When you're installing WordPress for the first time, do you want us to keep the software up to date? You feel like you get that on all sorts of other things. Mac apps, for example, is always a button to do you want us to just automatically update in the background that that feels good.
And it does tell you, when you get a point release, so let's say we go to six. It does, you do get the email. So you do know that things like this have happened, but anyway, the point is there's a lot of WordPress websites that need to be up there. Top to go and I'll take them right away.
David,
David Waumsley: [00:26:18] I think some of them though, it was a little bit, yeah, hold back. I believe, I don't know when this statistic was made, but there was a whole back going into version five because of the Gutenberg changed. So a lot of people didn't update because they weren't sure what that was going to mean for them.
So may be maybe legitimate reasons for some holding back.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:26:36] And now we're on to sea related stuff. Cause apparently, apparently WordPress is pretty good on the old Google side of things.
David Waumsley: [00:26:47] Yeah, this is another one I've stopped. I think from the kin start article as well. So according to Matt Cutts, so this is already data in it from the Google web spam team.
Cause he's no longer there. 80 to 90% of Google's crawling issues are solved by WordPress takes care of that by default. So it's good for us.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:27:06] I do remember when I came to WordPress, that was one of the things which people kept saying all the time is that the default version of WordPress was good for Google.
Google could scrape all sorts of useful information out of a normal WordPress website, I guess all of that's in flux, because now there are so many different components which make up Google's crawling of the internet and the data that they put together on your website is so complicated.
And there's so many moving parts. I don't know if that's still true. I don't know if our default install of WordPress is as good as anything else or is even half decent or if plugins that do the SEO side of things are a total requirement. Don't know. But certainly I've got this lasting legacy in my head that WordPress is good for SEO.
David Waumsley: [00:27:53] Yes. Yeah. But yeah, I dunno what actually makes it good. Cause almost everybody needs an SEO plugin so they can
Nathan Wrigley: [00:28:03] adapt it. That's it. But I'm guessing that's to get the extra little boost that you need, if you want to be at number one. But I would have thought for most people who just want to have a website and we forget often don't we, that a significant proportion of people are creating WordPress websites just to get their thoughts out there.
It's a blog, it's not trying to be discovered by tens of thousands of people through Google. It's just a repository for people's thoughts and they share it with the people that they know and so on. But yeah, I guess for the top end, getting to the top of the search rankings, you do need all the extra juice and there's no way you could put all that into core because it's too complex.
David Waumsley: [00:28:45] Yeah. I think when I adopted WordPress, I think at the, when other CMS is out there that didn't even allow to have the pretty URL. So they were made up of numbers, it was right as it is by default on a WordPress, unless you actually tick on that you want yeah. Yeah. Meaningful titles. Yeah.
So I think it's reputation goes back from those days, it was one of the few there where, you know, what in your URL was that real words.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:29:13] Yeah. Yeah. You, the permalinks could be set to be the actual title of the blog posts separated with hyphens. Yeah. And it was totally reasonable. Yeah. Good point.
Maybe that's where it goes back to just something as simple as that, but certainly, it has this aura of. Good for SEO, but obviously there's a thriving marketplace for SEO plugins. So it's obviously there's room for improvement. Next stop. Ooh, theme. Okay. Wow. Look at this post patchouli.
David Waumsley: [00:29:40] Yeah I probably shouldn't have put this in the general WordPress stuff, so it's the most popular or the most purchased a WordPress theme. That's on ThemeForest and that's all just premium stuff is Vada and Nevada costs 90 it's over fit. So $59 and it sold over 200,000 copies, meaning that it's generated over 12 million in sales and counting.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:30:07] Good grief. I've never used this theme. I don't go to ThemeForest anymore. I have this, I have this impression, these days that we've still got the metaphor over there of bloat and, one thing to do everything, which is not what I'm about now, but that is popular man, alive, $60, $59, 200,000 copies.
So that's yeah, like you say, $12 million. Yeah. Is that still going? Is his thing for a, still a thing? Does it thrive as far as I think,
David Waumsley: [00:30:42] I think he does. It was always leading wasn't there. It's almost like we lived in two worlds and I think we probably move on to talk about this in the themes.
And what's on, what's the most popular ones on wp.org and then, against what's popular out there generally. And I think, that's, when you start to see the theme forest, the big mega themes start to appear, I don't think they're as popular as they used to be. So I think the likes of with having Elementor and having Astro, we were getting these kind of page builder, WordPress page builder themes, which are starting to dominate.
And I think stealing a little bit from theme forest, but, BARDA and those other ones then fold and these really big popular ones are still flat sums. One that I keep getting keeps getting talked about all of the time, not in our circles so much, but just generally as a commerce solution.
It just doesn't
Nathan Wrigley: [00:31:42] feature. The thing that when I first came to WordPress, I did try out a few theme forest themes, but it quickly became obvious to me that the I was being missed, sold. In other words it, it purported to make my life easy. And actually I just spent the whole time trying to undo the things that I didn't want and the things that were supposed to be easy.
I don't know, things like portfolios after a little bit of poking around you realize you know what? That's actually fairly easy to do on my own elsewhere. And so, and so it goes, and so I lost interest the idea of one theme to rule them all that can do everything. You quickly realize that's not what I want.
I don't want that. I want one thing. That's hardly got anything in and I'll build on top of, rather than trying to pull all the stuff out that I don't need. And I'm sure the same would be true for many people listening to. Yeah, it
David Waumsley: [00:32:36] feels a little bit like with trading places, with some of the success that ThemeForest had initially with WordPress, it was doing so well compared to the stuff that was on the repository, all those kind of separate, simple, like Genesis framework, things like that, that were became very popular.
But now it almost feels like things like Astro are able to bring. Along the kind of stuff that you would get in those theme, forest megathemes now themselves. So they're in the repository now. I think it's interesting how things have changed, but again, with the stats, if we have a look at the themes, which have the most installs, according to wordpress.org, then it's interesting.
The tab, if you go on most popular, I'm not quite sure how it's measured with the plugins. It's pretty simple. It's down to installs, but it obviously isn't the case because they put number one as the 2021 theme, which is under a million where the 2020 theme is over a million and Astoria is over a million.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:33:38] Do you ever use these, the default WordPress themes on a site where, which you actually launched and said, that's it, that's your way?
David Waumsley: [00:33:48] No, not me, but I did have a friend who used, I think it was the 2017 theme for her blogger. And yeah, it was the first time really that I've seen anyone go with the default.
I was going to do help her with some work on it. So that's the closest I've ever got someone who's and they were really stuck with, it was going to be quite difficult for them to change their theme. But yeah, I guess a lot of people start with that. She was doing very well as well with it.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:34:21] I guess it's a point of reference, isn't it? In many cases, they're trying to demonstrate how a certain thing that's new can be implemented. So you feel like with 20, 21, there might be aspects of blocks or block patterns, that kind of thing, and it's just demonstrating that. This is how you could do that.
Not necessarily here's use this. This is the best thing possible because we all know that, but it's amazing in that top 10 list from wordpress.org. You're right. The order's all messed up, isn't it? Because we've got ones with bigger numbers in the wrong place, according to those numbers, but I'm just going to go through the whole list if that's all right.
All 10. See if this rings true to you, 2021 is number one. Oh, I'm going to sound like Smashie and nicey. The I'm going to go in reverse order, although I've released number one already. So in 10th place we have cadence. Number nine is Neve eight is popular. FX. What? Number seven, ocean WP number 6 20 19.
Number 5 20 17. Number four. Fresh in its. Hello.
Yeah, that's it. The ever popular number 2 20 20. And in number one for the fifth week running it's 22 1 there you go. Sorry. I
David Waumsley: [00:35:41] apologize. Really needed some music with that.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:35:47] That's the one.
David Waumsley: [00:35:49] But, well, yes, but interestingly, if we take built with trends and they've only really, as far as I can see might be me not being able to handle my way around a built with, but we can only see the top million and it's really different. Of course, there's some things that are not on the repository, like divvy, that's the number one they're in the top million.
And then there's popper, which I have to look up. I didn't even know what it was.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:36:15] This is Hendrickson one. And I only know that because it's written on the page in front of me, but I confess I've not come across or at least I don't think I've come across that. I know it's such a simple
David Waumsley: [00:36:27] theme with a concentration on simplicity and accessibility and those kind of stuffs.
I didn't know how to a theme so popular, but still there. Number two, and then it's Astra, then it's a Varda then it's the Genesis framework, which I know used to share top place with Devi. So it's obviously on the fall generate press, and then we start to move into 20, 20, 20 17, 20 21. Following that.
So it's a. Just suddenly seeing divvy there, which is really a page builder in a theme, isn't it? Yeah. Just those all the numbers out just a little
Nathan Wrigley: [00:37:04] bit. Yeah, it is interesting. So the belt with trends are really different from the, what we're getting on wordpress.org. There's some overlap, but there's also some completely complete disagreements.
And I don't know. It feels to me almost as if the built with one feels more like my experience in the world. Cause I know that divvy is incredibly popular. I know that Astro is really popular, but yet again, there are some creeping in there that. Like the popper one, I don't know that I've seen that in the wild, but I've definitely seen Dimmi in the wild and Astra in the wild and generate press in the wild and so on.
So yeah, I don't really know peculiar, I guess we've just gotta be a bit mindful that these whatever built with is using to scrape the internet and figure this out is bound to be fraught with error. But the bottom line is there are some plugins and there are some themes in this case, which we've heard of, and they are really popular.
And I guess if you make any of those lists and you are behind that theme, you're probably doing better.
David Waumsley: [00:38:07] Yeah, sure. I have a quick look at the the plugins in the, how they, I can give you the music. Yeah.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:38:14] Oh am I going to do that? No, I don't think anybody's ready for that. No.
David Waumsley: [00:38:18] So plugins with the most installs, I'll get it from the top.
So we've got contact form seven. I, that always surprises me every time. Why that is so big. How shall I want to put this in perspective actually, because what we've got is a problem with what we read on.org, because it stops at 5 million plus yeah. There's record beyond that. So we have to get our statistics from elsewhere so we can roughly guess this.
So if we want, we've been told by Elementor is that they, according to their figures, they are over say 7 million installations. And that seems to link him with what. Actually w three texts are talking about them being the fastest growing builder outside of WordPress itself, and also numbers were built in.
So we're, I think we're element is probably right that the four and a half percent of the web over 7 million, the classic editor should be higher than that as in place. Number three, on the list. And then the next one is Yoast in number two, which is a Yoast SEO, and they estimate that they've got 11 million.
So we don't have to guess that classic editor is somewhere between seven and 11
Nathan Wrigley: [00:39:34] million. I wonder why we don't have anything beyond 5 million. Now that we're into the terrain where well, Yost to claiming 11 million. That strikes me that we'll at that point, then we, if somebody thinks that they're on 10 plus million, we ought to have 10 to 15 bracket.
Yeah, it's it's just interesting to know. It's not required. Yeah. Anything above 5 million is jolly big, but but still, it would be nice to have some sort of more accurate measuring on this, but you're right. That contact form seven. Not really is puzzling to me, but it's free. And it does what it needs to do.
David Waumsley: [00:40:11] Yeah, so it's been around a long time as well, but also I checked out the built with the statistics on that. And again, it's the top million, but says it's 11% installation for that. So it's you know, it's backed up. It is more probably than the 11 million of Yoast SEO, it's 11 cents.
But if
Nathan Wrigley: [00:40:33] you literally need a contact form where somebody puts in an email address and a message. And wants to hit a button. That's why you don't need anything else. And I would imagine for most people, that's all they want. They just want a way to, to be contacted. So it doesn't need all the gravity forms, fluent forms, WP forms, whizzbang stuff.
It just needs to do a simple thing.
David Waumsley: [00:40:59] I know, but it's just interesting. I don't, I don't want to put it down, but it's it's had its fair share of security issues you know, it's it, and it's very limited as well. So it was a lot of ad-ons for it. So it's surprising that people go for that as a default.
And I don't think it's necessarily the best for accessibility either, so yeah. But yeah, it's got 11% according to bill in and then gravity forms, which we can't see, obviously on the wordpress.org has got somewhere. Depends how you're measuring it somewhere between 2.5 to three. Yeah, I'll share so
Nathan Wrigley: [00:41:38] interesting.
Let's just go through the list one to 10 quickly. So this is not in reverse order. This is number one is contact form seven. I won't do the numbers. Number two, Yoast SEO. Number three, the classic editor. We'll come back to that. Number four, ELA mentor number five, Akismet number six. Woo commerce. Number seven, Jetpack number eight, really simple SSL.
Wow. It's still in there. Number nine, WP forms, a number 10. Wordfence.
David Waumsley: [00:42:10] It is surprising, particularly really simple SSL. Is it required any longer than,
Nathan Wrigley: [00:42:17] oh, you would have thought that? I think it wasn't that a transition plugin to make it so that a site that you had previously built and you didn't want to go into the database and update anything you could install this and it would just take care of, I don't know how it did it, to be honest, maybe it was rewriting something HD access or something.
I don't know, but it would ensure that all pages visited were on SSL, but clearly that moment has passed and any new site is by default going to be on SSL. One would hope from now on. So you feel that one had its moment and it's going to drop off the list, but there's some surprising stuff in there.
I'm surprised that Akismet is in there. Yeah, I'm not surprised that WooCommerce is in there. I'm surprised that jet pack managed to get into the top 10 because there's. Hmm. There's a lot of people who have a real issue with Jetpack. I'm not surprised about WP forms because they have a free offering, which does more than contact form seven.
It's not anywhere near as capable as the premium version, but it's still, it will do your basic contact form and it will do it beautifully. And Wordfence yeah, that, that one, yeah, doesn't surprise me, but the big one to discuss anyways is the classic editor. Number three.
David Waumsley: [00:43:34] Wow. Yeah.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:43:38] You think though you liked that being at number three I'm we, we live on different camps in this one.
Don't we have to stare at each other from across the
David Waumsley: [00:43:47] river. Yeah. Yeah. The Gutenberg plugin itself has got 300,000 active downloads. So that's the number of people who are keen to find out what's going on with Gutenberg ahead of the time, or just people are confused. It
Nathan Wrigley: [00:44:04] could be that, but I'm, I'm guessing that over time, that classic editor one, especially as it's the support for it, isn't it, is it next year?
The support for it's going to be taken away, it'll just either be maintained by the community it will fade into posterity. But it's certainly in the news, a lot of people choosing to enable the classic editor in that way. You do it differently. Don't you, which you've got a disabled Gutenberg plug.
Okay. Is that disabled?
David Waumsley: [00:44:34] Guttenberg yeah because the, if I'm not using Guttenberg tol is starting to get a little bit bloated as they start adding features. So there's the blocks CSS file, which is getting bigger. If I'm not using it, I don't want that output into all pages. So disabled, good bug will do that for me.
So I've sought it out and we moved the classic editor to them. So
Nathan Wrigley: [00:44:56] there is no editor at all. It's all page builder from top to.
David Waumsley: [00:45:01] Yeah. Yeah, so, yeah, there's a lot of sites like that where I'm just, it's good to, book's not going to be used. Yeah. Personal sites are use, leave Guttenberg on.
I don't bother with it if it's going to be useful, but if I'm not going to output any content using good to book might as well clear up the bloke.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:45:19] Yeah. Makes sense. So that's the plugins by we've done a lot of statistics, I think is that if we got any more, no, we've got the quirky, weird things to do still.
David Waumsley: [00:45:29] We'll just have to selectively go through some of these things. The one that says there's some really interesting facts. If you go to w three texts.com forward slash blog, they have web technology factor of the day. And there's some great stuff here. It obviously goes out of date fairly quickly, but one that I love, but I can't make out is that that WordPress has.
82.4% of the CMS market share amongst websites in Japan or Japanese in Japanese, whereas only 43.9% of the market share among sites in German. So now the language actually is right.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:46:12] So yeah, so the people speaking Japanese love word, but like really loved using WordPress, whereas about half, as many people speaking or writing their things in German love WordPress.
So that's fascinating. Isn't it? I wonder why,
David Waumsley: [00:46:28] I dunno. Is it Germans? Don't like WordPress as much as the Japanese do or is
Nathan Wrigley: [00:46:33] this the language I was wondering if the, maybe the translation into Japanese is just, is really good or, there's just a vibrant community that I don't know, but it being double is quite amazing.
You would've thought it would have been more even that with a few percentage variations here and there, but. 88, nearly 83. 82% of the CMS market share for the Japanese speaking world. That's fascinating. That's so unusual. And then, so Japan, it's a Japanese
David Waumsley: [00:47:02] guy, isn't it? Who made the Hong Kong seven plugin?
Nathan Wrigley: [00:47:06] Yes. Yeah. Yeah. There you go. That's maybe what's driven the entire thing. We now know what it is. It's contact form seven and and his amazing contributions. Okay. That's a weird one. What's next November 25th, 2020 will. Commerce is used by more sites than Shopify Magento, open cart and press the shop combined.
So a little over six months ago. Woo. Commerce is dominating. The e-commerce space. This is the thing that I just hear all the time and the acquisitions that we've had in the WordPress space recently, a lot of them are related to woo commerce. Matt Mullenweg is really bullish that we are only just beginning to tap into the potential of WooCommerce.
So it doesn't surprise me. It is a, it is a brilliant thing. And I know that there are bits of it that we wish were different, and we wish that certain UI elements were more prominent or that there were different combinations of a checkout experience and so on, but it is, you can customize it with with either some custom code or you can buy a plugin to fix just about anything that you want to fix.
But the fact that it, yeah, it's more than all the others combined is pretty amazing.
David Waumsley: [00:48:23] Yeah, I think I might lose that now because of the growth of Shopify it's I think it's presently, this is from memory. Cause I looked it up. I haven't written this down, but I think it's 28% of the market share for woo commerce.
And
Nathan Wrigley: [00:48:40] what was it? 3.4 for Shopify. Now that was 3.4% of the CMS space. So for, yeah, so for exactly in the shopping cart, it must be a, quite a bit higher than that.
David Waumsley: [00:48:50] I think it's around 12 to 13%, so it's growing locally
Nathan Wrigley: [00:48:55] okay. So that tells us that all the three, the Magento, the open cart and the Prestos shop there.
They're pretty small.
David Waumsley: [00:49:01] Yeah. Open cart definitely die in his net over time now part now. Oh yeah. Okay. Some other facts. I'll throw this one in, cause it's me having a little bit of a dig at Gutenberg really? So on GitHub, you can see. Gutenberg has over 3000 issues that are still to be resolved at the moment, but it has closed 12,000 of those issues since it started.
But I just think it's always interesting that because that's how north, a lot of issues for everyone to bear in mind. Some of those are going to be requests
Nathan Wrigley: [00:49:37] where fast running out of time. So let's pick some of the better quirkier ones. What have you got here? I'm just, you'll notice.
I'm just sidestepping the Google Guttenberg problems. I'm just you're fine. Square space. As of earlier this year, January, 2021, Squarespace is now the fourth, most popular content management system, overtaking, Drupal, and Wix. This is a sad day for me. I have great respect for Drupal. I have no interaction with Wix to speak of.
So I can't mention that, but Squarespace taken over them, the mighty Drupal, but that tells us that we haven't done second place there because if we've got Squarespace in fourth, WordPress in first what's second and third.
David Waumsley: [00:50:24] We had, I've lost my touch. Put Joomla. Wasn't a horse. Yes, that was the next one.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:50:32] Yeah. Yeah. This let us do a conversation. Before we pressed record, which was all about the CMS that came and went and it seemed tremendous. Oh, goodness me things that I've tried. What I try is not really a CMS, but CodeIgniter, I remember using that one and then can really related to that. What was the product from the same people that did CodeIgniter?
Oh, it was a CMS and you could pay for it. You had to pay the moveable type. Wasn't the, your type, but movable type is another one, which was really popular at the time. And it has gone, maybe somebody in the comments can let me know what it was, but I tried using that one as well. And you had to pay a license and that was enough for me.
I wanted it all open source. And so I moved over to WordPress, but anyway, there you go. What else have we got top widget? This is a weird one top widgets. I don't really even get what's going on here. Top widgets, Google fonts, 8% Google tag manager. I can get that. 6% font. Awesome. 5% WP.
5% plugins. I don't really get what's going on. What is this one about?
David Waumsley: [00:51:39] Oh, it's farm trends with built with, and it's looking at their widgets. I think we tend to be a little bit wary with anything we're built with because it's what they managed to pick up from sites. So it may not be entirely accurate.
I just found it an interesting thing on there. What they saw. I thought Google fonts in the top million, only 8% were using Google fonts in Vegas low to me. Yeah.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:52:05] Yeah. That is cause you see them everywhere. Don't you is the difference. I feel that might not be the case going forwards.
It feels like with core web vitals, a lot of people are issuing that and deciding to that and having local font files.
David Waumsley: [00:52:22] Yeah, absolutely. We were going back before the days of Google font to, to using system fonts,
Nathan Wrigley: [00:52:28] trusting isn't it, we've had a drive for features and customization and things looking different.
And now we're having a dry for pulling everything right back and pairing it all back in speed, becoming most important thing. If we wait five years and another bustle come along and we'll all have to jump on that, but we don't know what that is yet. Okay. Another one apparently. May the fourth 20, 21.
I don't know if that was the date when this happened, but for the first time, since we S the surveying was started in 20 well, 2011, the engine X, it has become the most popular web server. Taking the helm from Apache that feels like exactly. What's been happening in my world, at least. Anyway, I definitely was using Apache and then engine X.
I'm still not because I don't really move with servers anymore and I don't follow any of that kind of stuff. I'm not a hundred percent sure exactly what the benefits are and how it performs the the speed that it does. But certainly that seems to be the way everybody's going. I put engine X on any server that I create now.
David Waumsley: [00:53:39] Yeah. And I think maybe just one last one though, which I think is just interesting, Jen, this is the 8th of January this year that tastes TTP two is now used by 50% of all websites going up from 42% of the year ago. So yeah, that's growing a lot. I thought it would be actually quite higher than that. I find it.
I look up quite a lot of other people's sites actually to see whether they are HTTP two. And I never find any that aunt. Yeah. It
Nathan Wrigley: [00:54:11] just seems to be the default nowadays. It's such a nice piece of technology as well. The fact that it has all the different, the things that it can do better really do make the internet a faster, better place to, to inhabit.
Yeah. So that's good. Do you want to do the hosting things? Cause the hosting one just looks really quirky. Should we just do them in no particular order? The popular friends with built with.com forward slash hosting. These are the ones that come up and there's a lovely one in here. This is great.
This is a real insight into how they're scraping work. So in amongst the top 10 I'll do nine. And then I'll do the the final one. We've got cloud flare hosting. Okay. I never used CloudFlare hosting Amazon. I'm guessing that's probably right near the top Google and Google cloud. I don't quite know how they're different.
I didn't know. You could host on just Google Microsoft and all of their different pieces of software, confluence networks, DigitalOcean, OVH, go, daddy hats, ner. Okay. And Microsoft and again, with, as yours. So they've got two positions like Google, but this is my favorite one. I believe this is the future.
This is the hosting company that we should all buy shares in domain, not resolving.
David Waumsley: [00:55:33] Awesome love. I love it. Yes. That's that's
Nathan Wrigley: [00:55:37] hysterical because it tells us that, in the top 10. There are so many sites that are just not doing anything. They're just sitting there consuming the world's resources.
You know, you go and try to buy a domain name and some, somebody already bought it and it represented getting into the top 10. Yeah.
David Waumsley: [00:56:00] Who's going to buy the domain name first domain. Not to domain, not resolve in hosting. Go in there
Nathan Wrigley: [00:56:06] right now. Come, go in there. I'm going to buy it. Yeah, that's brilliant.
Isn't it? And you can immediately get it into the top 10. Yeah. So good. I think we're done what we're doing next time.
David Waumsley: [00:56:16] Next time. It's oh, so I think we're going to do oh, for open source. We haven't done anything on GPL, I think. No. Yeah.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:56:24] Can we talk about that? Actual source, like SAU CE can we do you know, Katie
David Waumsley: [00:56:31] brown gravy.
I think it's right. Although we're running ahead, our scheduling is going wrong, but you've been asking the question about acquisitions and I think that's part of this discussion on open source that you think.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:56:45] Okay. Yeah, I think so. Let's put that crowbar that in for next time. Okay. That was lovely.
That was really interesting. And very nerdy. We've got to talk about numbers, but thanks for doing all the hard research for that. That was brilliant. And we'll see you in a couple of weeks. Yeah. Bye-bye. I hope you enjoyed that episode, who knew that was so many numbers in the WordPress space about so many different things.
I genuinely learned a lot with David researching this episode and putting it all together. So many figures and so many of them so large, just WordPress is giant and all of the different things that are attached to it, plugins, themes, hosting, and all of that. It's just amazing. The size of a lot of these numbers.
If you enjoyed the episode, please find a way of letting us know about it. Go to WP Builds.com. Search for episode number 236, or go to our mustard. On instance, WP Builds.social, and make a comment over there. You can start your own brand new thread all about it, but we'd love to hear your thoughts all about that.
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Don't forget also to join us every Monday, 2:00 PM. UK [email protected] forward slash. For all this week in WordPress show, I'll be joined as always by Paul Lacey and some notable WordPress guests. And we chat through the weekly WordPress news. And then we push that out the following day as a blog piece and an audio episode.
So lots going on. I hope to catch you at some point this week. If I don't, we'll see you soon, stay safe. I'm going to fade in some cheesy music and say, bye bye for now. .
