WordPress used for over 60 percent of top-100 Inc. sites

A couple months ago, a marketing consultant to a major law firm pooh-poohed my suggestion on Facebook that he consider WordPress for the law firm’s digital publishing needs.

He called WordPress simplistic publishing software used only for blogs that’s inherently insecure and innapropriate for a major law firm.

Well, according to Nelio Software, 62 percent of the 100 fast growing companies in the United States (@inc5000) are using WordPress to power their sites. This is up more than 20 percent from just a year ago.

We’re talking well beyond do it yourself here. Whether blog, website or application we’re talking about sites developed by experienced WordPress developers versus something set up with WordPress off the shelf.

From Marie Dodson (@Mdodson12) of Torque Magazine, my source:

From ecommerce and apps to business websites, personal blogs and beyond, WordPress powers online experiences for startups and enterprise companies alike.

……

It’s quite clear that WordPress has in many ways broken free of the “just for blogging” stereotype, which can be seen by the fact that 27 percent of all websites use the CMS to power their websites.

While WordPress is still a leading choice for bloggers, it’s also become the solution of choice for brands like Mercedes Benz, Samsung, Nikon, NASA, and more.In recent years, open source has taken the internet by storm. In fact, companies like Microsoft, Google, Tesla, and even the US government have embraced open source as part of their digital practices.

Perhaps the biggest reason for WordPress’s growth is the fact that it’s open-source software. Per Dodson:

[O]pen-source foundation has positioned it at the cutting-edge when it comes to innovation. For example, when Google Glass launched in 2014, the very next day there were plugins already available, which enabled users to leverage and integrate the new technology with their sites.

Compare this to proprietary or closed solutions, where this process is often long and grueling. Open source software is more customizable, scalable and agile, which is invaluable in today’s era where businesses need to move faster to stay competitive.

Open-source software benefits from the collective knowledge and collaborative work of over a hundred thousand developers worldwide, in the case if WordPress. Proprietary software can simply not keep up with the speed of improvements being done of open-source.

Law firms often turn to proprietary software for their websites, blogs, micro-sites and other digital publishing. Doing so they could be vendor-locking themselves into often outdated/expansive software and limited and expensive future upgrades.

LexBlog moved to WordPress years ago. I am glad we did.

We’ve been able to develop a software as a service business empowered by a custom WordPress solution that provides law firms with a better, faster and cheaper product. A product on which we can push regular upgrades and feature enhancements.

This would have been impossible without open-source and WordPress.

After talking with Matt Mullenweg, co-founder of WordPress, a summer ago, I walked away thinking this guy sees WordPress dominating website development in the years ahead – growing from today’s 27% market share to 90%. It’s not that crazy — and we’re all likely to benefit as a result.