Mind-blowing WordPress Theme and Plugin Statistics In 2023

Are you trying to make a name for yourself and your business on the internet? Then the first thing you need to do is create a new website; for that, you will need a content management and web development platform.

The most popular web development platform according to statistics is WordPress, which holds more than 65% market share among CMSs. 

Now you may be wondering, “What’s the reason behind this insane popularity and dominance of WordPress?”. So let’s check out some statistics why.

• WordPress is quite user-friendly. So anyone, regardless of their technical skills and expertise, can design and create a fully functional website with it. 
• Since it is a flexible website development platform, you can create anything from a simple single-page website to a massive eCommerce store with it. 
• Its built-in SEO features can help your page and content gain “upvotes” from the search algorithms to ensure a higher ranking on the SERPs.
• WordPress has loads of plugins and themes that you can use to customize almost every aspect of a website or page, from the appearance to innovative features and functionalities. 
• This CMS offers seamless integration with the social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc. So you can promote your new website or page more effortlessly. 
• It lets you add media files like pictures, videos, GIFs, etc., more easily. That will improve the user experience, reducing the click-through rate. 
• WordPress offers a multilingual (more than 70 languages) experience. So you can create and maintain your page or site in multiple languages to promote inclusivity and better user experience. 

These are just a few features why so many companies and individuals prefer this CMS. Don’t believe us? Take a look at these usage statistics of WordPress.

WordPress Usage Statistics

Here are the top usage statistics of WordPress:

• Over 35 million live websites are running on WordPress.
• More than 43% of all websites active on the internet today are created and powered by WordPress.
• WordPress holds over 64% market share in the CMS space, compared to Shopify, its nearest competitor, which holds just 6.1%. 
• This CMS creates more than 500 websites daily, while other popular options like Shopify and Squarespace are used for 60 to 80 only. 
• WooCommerce, which is a popular WordPress plugin, powers over 22% of the top 1 million eCommerce stores.

These are just a few mind-boggling WordPress statistics that showcase the dominance of this platform in the CMS space.  

Now, over the years, there have been various versions of WordPress CMS, and nearly all of them have been downloaded and used by millions of companies and individuals. Let’s see some statistics on how many people have been using the different versions of WordPress. 

• WordPress Version 5.2: 22% of all WordPress users.
• WordPress Version 5.1: 18.1%
• WordPress Version 5.0: 9.7%
• WordPress Version 4.9: 26.7%
• WordPress Version 4.8: 5.2%
• WordPress Version 4.7: 5.5%

As evident from these statistics, Version 4.9 of WordPress is the most popular one, with over 26.7% of users creating and maintaining websites with it. But all these versions of the statistics have one thing in common. They can help you create highly immersive, feature-rich websites at affordable costs, relatively easily. 

What Role Do The Themes & Plugins Play In WordPress Websites?

One of the most significant advantages held by WordPress over other CMSs is its vast repository of free and paid themes and plugins. They help developers customize and enhance almost every aspect of a website, from its appearance to its features and functionalities. 

Plugins are extensions that help to add and customize the features and functionalities of a WordPress website. You can use the plugins to improve the functionalities, add new features, optimize the security, performance, SEO, and other critical elements, and automate time-consuming tasks.

Furthermore, plugins can be installed, activated, and used by anyone, regardless of their programming skills, making them an incredibly user-friendly feature.

Themes help design and customize the looks and layout of a WordPress website. With WordPress themes, you can control visual elements like fonts, colors, images, page structure, etc. You can even customize the themes to create a unique design reflecting the style of a brand, company, or even your own.

Basically, with the help of plugins and themes, you can customize the looks and feel along with the features and functionality of a website quite comprehensively. 

WordPress Themes Statistics

WordPress themes are extensions that can help you customize every aspect of the design and layout of a website. They are essential for improving the appearance to ensure a better user experience.

Whether you want to create a dark mode or loads of colorful animations or just keep everything at its simplest, the thousands of themes in the official WordPress library and other marketplaces would help. 

Top Statistics On WordPress Themes

Let’s check out some of the major statistics regarding WordPress themes:

• There are over 31,000 themes (including free and premium ones) available in the official WordPress repository to customize the visual aspects and enhance the UI/UX of a WordPress website. 
• Not everyone can afford to purchase paid premium extensions to change the look of a website. So there are over 11,000 free themes in the WordPress library. 
• The average cost of a WordPress premium theme is around $77. 
• Frequently used in the top 1 million websites, Divi and Astra are two of the most popular themes in WordPress.

There are thousands of free and premium themes for WordPress websites. But some of them are used more often than others. 

Most Popular WordPress Themes

So let’s check out the most popular themes for WordPress and their statistics with regard to active installations: 

Divi – With more than one million active installations, Divi is the most frequently used theme on WordPress websites. Divi’s visual page building and customizing capabilities. Whether you are a beginner or an expert developer, Divi can help you create spectacular, highly customized designs quickly and effortlessly.

Active Installations: 1M+

Astra is another highly popular theme for WordPress websites, with more than one million active installations. Along with a variety of color options, typography choices, multiple layouts, stylish headers, etc.

This theme features some excellent pre-made demo sites that you can choose to quickstart the website development more effortlessly. So many website owners prefer this theme because it offers built-in SEO qualities, which help the website rank well on the SERPs.

Astra is also available in a Pro version including more exclusive features.

Active Installations: 1M+

Hello Elementor – As the name suggests, this WordPress theme is designed specifically for those using Elementor page builder for their website. Hello Elementor is built with a focus on performance.

So you can create an aesthetically pleasing yet fast-loading website. That can help improve the user experience of the website, ensuring it achieves a better ranking on the SERPs. 

Active Installations: 1M+

Features of Hello Elementor:

• Several pre-designed templates to ensure the website is up and running more effortlessly. 
• Round-the-clock support for every aspect of web design. 
• It is compatible with the WooCommerce plugin. So you can create an eCommerce website more easily. 
• Hello Elementor is an SEO-friendly theme, so your page will get a better ranking as a result of it. 

Avada – Although not in the official WordPress repository, Avada is a premium, highly popular theme available for purchase in the Envato Market. It is a customized drag-and-drop page builder with a variety of pre-built templates.

For WooCommerce websites, Avada can help you create customized checkout pages, product pages, carts, and an overall unique shop. It is also compatible with popular WordPress themes like WPML, Yoast, Contact Form 7, JetPack, and Slider Revolution.

Total Sales: 880K+

OceanWP – With over 700K active installations, OceanWP is a multipurpose WordPress theme that offers amazing customization options along with more than 220 demo templates to ensure the best website design possible. Moreover, you won’t need any kind of coding skills and expertise to change the looks of your website through this WordPress theme.

Active Installations: 700K+

These are 5 of the most popular themes according to the statistics that are used to design and customize almost every aesthetic aspect of a WordPress website. One of the biggest reasons behind the popularity of these themes is that they help design websites with respect to the latest trends in WordPress.

Latest Design Trends In WordPress Websites

So let’s check out some of the latest design trends in WordPress websites:

• Nostalgia Web 1.0 Designs: Nowadays, one of the biggest trends for WordPress websites is going back to the nostalgic Web 1.0 designs with pixelated screens and vibrant colors. More and more people are going back to robotic typographies like Times New Roman, ITC American Typewriter, and Courier. 
• Dark Mode: Often, people don’t want bright screens and colorful designs. They want the best features but with a darker screen that won’t make them squint. The dark yet modern aesthetics of dark mode are so enticing that everyone will stop and stare at your website. 
• Basic hand-drawn-like designs: Sometimes, under-designed sketches similar to hand-drawn caricatures can help the websites look simple yet sophisticated. It showcases a hint of relatability that often draws in more organic traffic and improves customer engagement. 
• Micro-interactions: Sometimes, it’s the little things that make a website better. One of those things could be the micro-interactions when the cursor hovers over buttons and links. Whether it’s just a simple highlight or size change or a particular action, these micro-interactions can help improve the user experience of the website. 
• Minimalistic design: Nowadays, in some of the best websites around the world, be it Apple’s or Google’s, the common entity is the minimalistic design. Showcase the essential functions, simple design, clean text, and a light or dark theme. Sometimes, the best you can do with the design is to keep it simple. 

Nowadays, web designers are choosing amongst the thousands of themes on the official repository and other online markets to ensure they can help with these latest, most popular design trends in the best way possible. 

WordPress Plugin Statistics

One of the major benefits of using WordPress over any other CMS is the plugins. Plugins are extensions that help enhance every little feature and functionality of a website. With plugins, you can customize the website without an ounce of coding skills or experience. 

Top Statistics on WordPress Plugins

Let’s check out the top WordPress plugins statistics:

• Right now, there are more than 60,000 free plugins in the official WordPress plugin repository. 
• Collectively, the total downloads gathered by these plugins are in the billions. 
• Yoast SEO is the top most popular WordPress plugin, with over 5 million active installations.
• Yoast SEO has more than 25,000 5-star ratings, which is the most for any WordPress plugin. 

These are just a few of the top statistics. But if you want to understand the true power of plugins, check out the most popular ones. 

Most Popular WordPress Plugins

Here are 5 of the most popular WordPress plugins with their enterprising features:

Yoast SEO is the #1 plugin to go for if you want your website or page to rank on the top of the search engine result pages. This plugin offers title optimization, keyword integrations, customized URL slugs, image alt tags, and meta descriptions.

The aim of this plugin is to help you improve the search rankings, increasing organic traffic and customer engagement. Almost every WordPress website active today uses Yoast SEO for better rankings and traffic.

Active Installations: 5M+

JetPack – Created by Automattic (the same company that brings WordPress), JetPack is among the most popular plugins, with millions of downloads and active installations. It serves various purposes, from security and backup to speed and performance. This plugin is available in both free and paid plans.

Active Installations: 5M+

WooCommerce is the go-to plugin to convert any WordPress website into a fully-fledged eCommerce store. Whether you are creating a new eCommerce business or taking your brick-and-mortar store online, WooCommerce would be the perfect platform for it. Since it is a plugin made for commercial purposes, you need to be a business owner to install it on your website.

Active installations: 5M+

Contact Forms By WPForms is a popular plugin for creating customized contact forms for a WordPress website without an ounce of coding skills or experience. With this plugin, you can also create feedback forms, subscription forms, order forms, survey forms, payment forms, etc. Moreover, several pre-built templates can help you customize the website more quickly and effortlessly. 

Active installations: 5M+

Wordfence Security is a popular plugin for securing a website comprehensively with features like malware scanner, live traffic views, endpoint firewall, robust login security features, etc. So your website will be protected against threats like brute force attacks, malware, spam, SQL injections, etc.

Active installations: 4M+

Although these five plugins have the highest active installation numbers according to the statistics, there are several options in the WordPress official repository with similar features and are trusted by thousands and even millions of websites.

Trending Features And Functionalities In WordPress Websites

Here are some of the trending features and functionalities in WordPress websites:

• Mobile Responsiveness: Did you know more than 60% of all website traffic is through mobile phones? That’s why, nowadays, more and more people ensure that their website responds better on mobile phones than PCs. For a website to be mobile-responsive, its design and layout should adapt to the device size and open quickly. 
• Artificial Intelligence: Other than for active purposes like chatbots and voice searches, you can use Artificial intelligence for gathering analytic data about the website. It can provide the users with information like when the traffic is at its highest and lowest, how much user engagement is, and at what point on the website the users usually click off. 
• Chatbots: Chatbots are one of the best advancements in website and app development in recent times. They can help you provide useful support and advice to the customers based on their queries without taking too much time.
  
  Although the responses generated by chatbots are fully automated, more often than not, they look similar to how a human would answer a question. So more and more people are trying to include chatbots in websites to improve user experience and customer support. 
• Video Backgrounds: Video backgrounds are another advanced functionality that can help improve the user experience of a website. With useful information on the home and other pages, you can include animations or live-action videos in the background to make the website look more catchy.
• Voice Search: Voice search is one of the best features to have, especially on eCommerce websites. By integrating voice search with AI, you can ensure a better user experience since people will be able to search for exactly what they are looking for more easily.
  
  Plus, if your website supports multiple languages, any user will be able to search for their desired products more easily. With the voice search feature, you can also help the users navigate through the website more effortlessly. 

These features and functionalities can improve almost every aspect of your website. And the best part is that with WordPress, there are plugins available for all these features. So you can extensively customize your website without an ounce of coding knowledge or expertise. 

Conclusion

We hope you enjoyed our summary with WordPress theme and plugin statistics and get an overview of how big the WordPress CMS really is.

As mentioned earlier, one of the biggest advantages of using WordPress over other content management systems is that there are thousands of themes and plugins in its official repository. So you can customize every nook and cranny of your website even if you don’t have any kind of history in coding skills and experience. 

When creating a website or starting a blog, it’s important you install only those plugins you absolutely need rather than going completely overboard with them. Otherwise, your website will slow down, decreasing the user experience and web traffic. 

If you are confused about what plugins and themes to include in your website, hire a WordPress development company or get in touch with a professional developer. They will help design the best possible website with respect to your requirements and expectations. 

Furthermore, we have listed 15 WordPress blogs you can follow to get WordPress news, development tips, statistics, and new trends to stay updated on what is happening in the WordPress world.

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