We all know WordPress is the most popular “blogging software” in the world now. I will correct the term “blogging software” to a “Content Management System“. Still many people wont agree with calling WordPress as a CMS. Well, that’s a debatable topic and lets do the heated discussion later. In this article, I intend to analyze the reach of WordPress in different countries and the market for different WordPress related services like Customizing WordPress, Premium Theme development, Premium Plugin development and many such services & product developments associated with WordPress.
The Global reach of WordPress
Now lets check some interesting numbers with WordPress, its 2016 now, when it comes to 2016 WordPress is the most loved online platform. 1 out of 6 websites has been built with WordPress.
WordPress powers over 60 million websites in the world. According to Alexa, 14.75% of the the top 1 million websites in Alexa rankings is powered by WordPress. 22% of all the new websites created in a day are powered by WordPress. So all these data emphasizes on the importance of WordPress as a platform to build websites.
Lets analyse this data using Google Trends. The image given below shows the comparison of search trends for WordPress, Joomla and Drupal. All these 3 (WordPress, Joomla and Drupal) are open source platforms used to build websites of different features and functionality.
From the image it’s crystal clear that WordPress is the ultimate winner as an open source software to power websites. WordPress is a winner in terms of popularity and demand from people. You can see that the search volumes for “Joomla” and “Drupal” decreased gradually with time, whereas “WordPress” shows clear increase in percentage of search volume.
Which all Countries use WordPress ?
This is tricky question to analyze! Chances are that people in almost all countries (with an active Internet population) might be using WordPress to power their websites. Its really hard to collect enough data on this to plot a graphical analysis. However we can get a fair understanding about the distribution of WordPress and about people actively searching for wordpress related products & services from Google Trends. I have attached a screenshot of the country specific distribution of wordpress related search terms.
From the image you can see that WordPress is actively searched for in American continents, Europe, Asia and Australia. There is not much of an activity related to WordPress from the African continents. USA and Canada tops the list from American continents, where as Brazil has the top activity from Latin America. Spain, United Kingdom and Germany tops the list from Europe. Its India, Indonesia and Pakistan from Asian continent. It’s quiet interesting to note that Chinese people has very low interest in WordPress. South Africa is one of the few countries from African continent with a reasonable interest in WordPress.
The usage of WordPress in different languages
Another tricky question to analyse. This time I don’t have a reliable source of data which can give you solid insights. However I would like to show you a screenshot from WordPress.com’s stats. This screenshot shows the percentage of languages used in WordPress.com blogs. Its not wise to depend on this data as a source for the self hosted wordpress installations and its usage in different languages. However we can make some intelligent guesses based on this screenshot.
According to the screenshot, English language accounts for 66% of WordPress usage whereas Spanish, Portuguese and Indonesian together accounts for 18.7% of WordPress localisations. These 4 languages together constitutes 84.7%. Rest of the languages taken together contributes only 15.3% of which Italian,German,French, Russian, Vietnamese and Swedish together contributes 8.4% of total WordPress localisations.
The final conclusion about languages is quiet interesting. 10 languages (out of the 100+ languages in this world ) contributes to 93.1% of localized usage of WordPress.
What is the use of this country/language specific data ?
Here comes the golden question. You took time to read all these analysis and what’s the whole point in analyzing it? The answer is doing business with wordpress and market research for the same. There are lots of business happening around WordPress in various forms. The most prominent of these are Customization services – like developing customized wordpress themes and plugins, customizing features for WordPress, developing a website ground up using WordPress etc. Other types of business includes selling premium themes, selling premium application level themes, premium plugins and such customized products for wordpress. One is pure service based business and the other one is more like a product business. There are many freelance designers and developers who make a living by providing WordPress related services. There are also fully established Web Development agencies which focus on WordPress based services and products. All these firms and freelancers bet on their ability to market their services and products to as many countries as possible.
Case study using Premium themes
If you are a designer/developer or an agency which creates premium themes for WordPress, which all markets would you prefer to sell your theme? Everyone aspires to sell their premium themes to as many countries and as many people. Now here comes the golden question – in which all languages you should release your premium theme ? Most of the premium theme creators miss out this point! A majority of the premium themes available in the market are not translated well into multiple languages. Some creators have made the theme “translation ready” – which means the buyer can translate the theme himself (if he wants to do so). But that’s extra work for the buyer and not many of them are comfortable doing this! So people always prefer themes that are already translated to their local languages. They tend to buy “translated themes” more than “translation ready” themes.
How to sell more premium themes ?
My advice to sell more premium themes is to make it available in maximum possible languages. But at the same time there is no point in translating it to all the languages available in this world. You need to translate the theme to a particular language, only if there is a demand for themes in that language.
Final words!
So here comes this article useful. We have analysed the usage of WordPress in different countries. We have also seen the usage of WordPress in different languages. From the data we now know that 10 languages dominate in WordPress usage and they contribute to over 93.1%. So it makes sense to translate your themes, plugins and wordpress related products to atleast these 9 languages (other than English). English is the default language of WordPress and you don’t need to do any kind of translations with English language. The remaining 9 languages hold importance and they contribute to over 33.1% of WordPress usage in terms of language.
