News Courtesy of WordPress.org:
WordPress now powers over 1/3rd of the top 10 million sites on the web according to W3Techs. Our market share has been growing steadily over the last few years, going from 29.9% just one year ago to 33.4% now. We are, of course, quite proud of these numbers!
The path here has been very exciting. In 2005, we were celebrating 50,000 downloads. Six years later, in January 2011, WordPress was powering 13.1% of websites. And now, early in 2019, we are powering 33.4% of sites. Our latest release has already been downloaded close to 14 million times, and it was only released on the 21st of February.
Ryan’s Take 
What an incredible run for the WordPress team. My first introduction to the platform was back in 2011. After much research, I decided it offered the most advantages over rival platforms for building sites. Prior to that, I always assumed that WordPress was just another blogging tool such as LiveJournal or Blogspot. It never dawned on me that it would bridge the gap between designers and bloggers.
I think that its accessibility and easy-to-use interface is what has propelled it to the level of success we see today. You don’t have to be an expert coder to build your own website. There are plenty of ready-to-go templates for people just looking to establish an online presence. Of course, depending on your skill level with coding and design, you might not achieve everything you desire in a website. However, at the very least, you can create an adequate website. There are plenty of tutorials online for WordPress newcomers to follow for those who don’t mind putting in a little effort.
I remember in the very early days of my experience with web design, building websites page-by-page via an HTML editor. PHP was still very much a new thing and dynamic content was a thing of fascination. Instead, each page I built was like it’s own separate entity. The header, navigation bar, and similar content all had to be adjusted on every page to account for sitewide changes in those sections. It was a very tedious process. One I’ll never take for granted thanks to WordPress’s core template structure.
Even though the developers of WordPress might make significant changes that aren’t well-received (hello Gutenberg), there’s no denying the positive impact they’ve made on designers, bloggers, businesses, and even corporations. They could’ve easily started charging for the platform once it gained traction. However, the decision to keep their core product free has undoubtedly helped to create relationships with big entities like Google and find other avenues of monetization. It would be hard for me to say, if I were in their shoes, that’d I’d make that same decision.
