Over half of top 100 blogs run on WordPress

Pingdom reports that WordPress has strengthened its position as the dominating blog platform or Content Management System (CMS) for the world’s most popular blogs.

52% of the world’s top 100 blogs are published on WordPress, up from the 48% last year.

Here’s a breakdown on the blogging platforms used. And the changes on each platform being used from year to year.

There are some heavyweights running multiple WordPress blogs in the top 100 with The New York Times (7) and Wired (3). However, number one, Huffington Post, and number five, Gothamist, are running on Movable Type.

Custom publishing solutions, the second largest group behind WordPress, are being used by 12 publications. This is down from 14 last year, perhaps indicating that publishers would rather stick to publishing than enter the world of software development.

Why the increased use of WordPress by major blogs?

• Improved security, if you have capable developers and IT people. WordPress was historically less secure than Moveable Type, especially in the hands of less seasoned IT folks.
• Easy to use and regularly updated publishing interface.
• Vibrant and large open source community to tap into for knowledge and custom solutions.
• Talented and dedicated team of engineers at Automattic, the corporate web development arm of WordPress founded by Matt Mullenweg, driving innovation across the WordPress network of blogs.
• Ability for developers such as LexBlog to leverage third party solutions, such as the Disqus commenting system, which are developed to be incorporated into WordPress.
• Skyrocketing use of mobile. WordPress provides publishers an effective and regularly updated publishing app as well as a platform for publishers to integrate WordPress or third party solutions for producing mobile optimized content.

LexBlog used Movable Type for years. It was secure and the development community was larger than that for WordPress, believe it or not. We now use WordPress as our core solution and modify it to provide an optimum publishing and performance experience for our professionals.

Why our change to WordPress for solo practitioners to the largest law firms in the world? The same reasons driving the top 100 blogs and publications to publish with WordPress.