WordPress Continues to Show Incredible Growth

As you might have already read, this past Saturday at WordCamp San Francisco Matt Mullenweg gave his annual “State of the Word” address, which is a much anticipated (at least by me) speech he has started giving yearly to cover the state of WordPress.

According to Matt, WordPress is has continued to show steady growth.    Here are the statistics he gave for WordPress.com:

• Page views grew from 1.5 billion to 6.5 billion/month
• 1/3 of the page views come from VIPs like CNN and LOLCats
• 120-160 million global unique visitors per month
• Two million new blogs created for the year
• 35 million new blog posts (up from 20 million)

As for WordPress.org users (which makes up most of this sites readers), it looks like there are 2.6 million active user-installed WordPress blogs.  These stats are based off of real data, so they should be pretty accurate.

Matt also commented on the future of WordPress, and their focus on building WordPress into a self-updating system.   This new process will be a one-click upgrade and will generate a list of incompatible WordPress plugins or WordPress themes (which will be made possible via the WordPress theme directory and plugin directory) and make upgrading a snap.

Overall, I’m very excited about the future of WordPress and think they are taking the right steps to continue growing and improving the software.  I think as long as they continue to integrate more of the most popular plugins into the core installation and add additional CMS functionality, Wordpress will continue to grow in popularity.