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WordPress Usage Up 4.7% During the Pandemic

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WordPress, the leading content managing system (CMS) in the world, saw an increase in market share of 4.7% to 41.7% since June of last year.

This from Joost De Valk, the founder of Yoast, the leading SEO plugin for WordPress.

As way of background, CMS is computer software used to manage the creation and modification of digital content. A CMS is typically used for enterprise content management (ECM) and web content management (WCM).

For law firms a CMS is used for their digital publishing, including blogs. The same for legal associations, law schools, and legal publishers.

Here’s a breakdown on marketshare by CMS system for this month.

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The W3Techs research, which is the basis of De Valk’s report, is based on the top 10 million sites on the web as provided by Alexa and the 1 million list provided by Tranco.

While some platforms like Tumblr and WordPress.com are huge, they won’t show up as high in these rankings because the individual subdomains are not considered separate websites by W3Techs. If included, this would only skew the WordPress numbers higher.

What’s it all mean for lawyers, law firms, legal associations and legal publishers?

  • As digital publishing grew for networking through the net during the pandemic when travel and face to face networking was curtailed, more people turned to WordPress for their online networking.
  • WordPress is not going away. It is swallowing the content management system market as Microsoft’s Word swallowed the word processing market before the days of web publishing. How many of you are using WordPerfect?
  • Your people and your hires know WordPress. They’ll have used it in the workforce and in school. No intimidation and learning curve.
  • Constant improvement by an open community of developments. WordPress is open source.
  • Lower costs to maintain and migrate. Market of people and ancillary services and solutions is greater.
  • Working with partners is easier. A aggregation and syndication partner such as LexBlog will be using WordPress as a core solution.

Sure, there are companies touting their proprietary CMS, and there will be some good ones doing so. But the upside of WordPress and its extensibility results in it having a leg up when it comes to digital publishing in the law.

There are also those who say WordPress is headed toward e-commerce and away from digital publishing and blogging.

No question the worldwide market is huge e-commerce, but I don’t see publishers finding WordPress inadequate. I also see WordPress advancing faster as a digital publishing tool than any other CMS right now.

If you’re using WordPress for digital publishing, you are riding the wave. For good reason.