WordPress is Twenty Years Old Today

Back in 2004, I wanted to start a blog. I had been researching blog engines for a while. We had many choices back then. There was Blogger.com, Movable Type, Typepad, and TextPattern. But it was WordPress that allowed me to get things going. It was easy to install; all you needed was a webspace that had PHP installed, a MySQL database, and an FTP client (you do remember those, right?). Its interface was simple, and so was building a theme for your site.

Even with my little knowledge of servers, and computers in general, I could set up a website in one night. WordPress brought the prospect of running a blog on your own webspace within arm’s reach, and it did so for many million other independent content producers.

Wordpress is 20 years old today. To say it revolutionised blogging by making a great product available for free under an open-source license is an understatement. Estimates say some 810 million websites run on WordPress today, that’s 43% of all of the Web. Amongst CMS-driven websites, WordPress has a 64% market share. It’s hard to imagine how many websites were brought to life just because WordPress exists.

And Automattic, the company that maintains and develops WordPress, is one of the few organisations that care about the Web. Automattic makes it easy to move your blog away from WordPress.com. They still support the development of WordPress and implement open standards like ActivityPub to promote an open and decentralised Web.

Here’s to another 20 years of WordPress.