WordPress is one of the best open source content management system available to build a website of any kind. You can use WordPress to build a blog, a news publishing website, a shopping cart, a real estate portal, a business directory, a corporate website, a job portal, a membership site or any such web based application that you can imagine. It is possible to customize WordPress in any shape and design that you can imagine. In this article, I am listing a handful of the most popular websites out there which are running on WordPress. I have taken care to list websites from different categories like news portal, blog, application based wordpress websites like jobs board, coupons selling website etc.
Some people are still skeptical about the power of WordPress to handle very high traffic, say in the range of millions of pageviews. This is a misconception. From my experience, I can say with 100% confidence that WordPress is capable of handling any amount of traffic to your website. I personally run & manage websites with more than a million pageviews in one month.According to Alexa.com’s (a website which monitors & classifies websites based on their traffic) reports, 14.3% of the worlds top 1 million (ranked in terms of website traffic) websites are powered using WordPress.
Now lets see some of the most popular & top websites using WordPress as their CMS. I have given a high importance to website traffic as it is the single measure of popularity.
The very famous website with tutorials and highly useful articles for web designers/developers runs on WordPress. SmashingMagazine has an Alexa rank of 1170 and is expected to have more than 15 million pageviews in one month. They have an active jobs board, a dedicated section for e-books and a shopping cart to sell their digital products (mainly e-books).
2. Mashable & TechCrunch
Mashable & TechCrunch are two highly popular news publishing websites which focus on technology industries & social media companies. Mashable focus on social media and new technology companies, whereas techcrunch focus on technology based startups. Both these websites are highly popular and serve more than 20 million pageviews in one month. Mashable has an Alexa rank of 338 while TechCrunch has an Alexa rank of 541. They both are powered using WordPress.
3. 27 Coupons
27Coupons is an Indian website which publishes discount coupons of Indian E-commerce shoppingcarts. They have an Alexa rank of 27521 and they serve more than 2 million pageviews in one month. This is a clean example of WordPress being used to build & run custom applications like a Coupons publishing website.
4. Variety
Variety is a highly popular entertainment & celebrity website which runs on WordPress. They have an Alexa rank of 13172 and they serve more than 10 million page views in one month.
The WordPress Showcase – is a great place to look for the most popular & top websites which use WordPress to power them. Some of the worlds most respected brands like Yahoo & BBC America uses WordPress to power their communication blogs. Guru.com a highly popular freelancing marketplace uses WordPress to power their blog. A good number of respected universities and colleges use WordPress to power their official websites
