About


The Approach

The popularity of WordPress cannot be denied, you can't take two clicks on the Internet without someone talking about how WordPress runs 25% of the Internet. Don't get me wrong I think its great. But I wanted some solid data.

So I downloaded the HTML and HTTP headers to 1 million sites and started doing some analysis.

By looking at the HTML and HTTP headers it is possible to determine if the site runs WordPress with a high degree of confidence. Using some regexes I looked for any site that had these strings in the responses (wp-content, wp-includes, wp-json) or WordPress in the Meta Generator Tag.

I expect the Internet to respond with but thats not 100% accurate. Well in my opinion it is pretty close, and there are likely more false negatives than false positives, so lets take this as a minimum number of sites.

I did manually remove a number of sites that matched my regex. The sites were pulling images from (wp-content) where the main page did not appear to be built on WordPress. Some big examples of sites that were pulling images from /wp-content/ but not built solely on WordPress include vice.com, bbc.com and the Washington Post. These sites have WordPress within their technology stack but it does not appear to be powering the front page.

More Data

1 million site analysis

Get Notified

As mentioned, I have data for the full 1 million Alexa sites. Analysis of WordPress in the Alexa Top 1 million sites will be published on wprecon.com.

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