Has WordPress reached a tipping point? Right now 14% of the web is powered by WordPress. That’s an astonishing statistic.

According to the WordPress stats page, there are over 50 million websites using WordPress. About 25 million of these are WordPress.com sites – that is, sites that are hosted by WordPress themselves on their shared blogging platform. These hosted sites are in the main blogs rather than full-blown websites. As a specialist in WordPress hosting, we find customers need the extra power you get with Self-Hosted WordPress, which is what we provide.

It was in September last year that Microsoft gave users of it’s Windows Live Spaces blogging platform 6 months to move to WordPress. From what we’ve heard, the transition was smooth. Live Spaces once hosted 7m bloggers and had 300m visitors.

The Google owned blogging service ‘Blogger’ doesn’t publish user numbers, but it’s thought to be around 15-20 million. In July of 2011 it was announced that Google intends to change the name of the service from “Blogger” to “Google Blogs,”. Whether this rebranding will have a negative or positive affect remains to be seen.

So what is WordPress’s secret?

Here are some of the features of WordPress

WordPress.com Features

• Free hosting for up to 3GB worth of space
• Blog content is maintained on WordPress.com web servers
• Ability to choose and customize templates (limited flexibility)
• Easy to get started; easy to use
• Upload and store image, video, and other (limited) file formats

WordPress Self-Hosted Features

• Blog content is maintained on user’s preferred web host
• Nearly unlimited ability to choose and customize templates and widgets
• Takes some technical ability to setup and configure – that why you should choose 2020Media!
• Files support limited only by web server, which likely means more than you’d ever need.

Use as content management systems

Finally, we look at the use of software that started out as blogging platforms as full blown content management systems. Many of our customers use WordPress as a website content management system, not as a blog.

Once again, WordPress is leading the way.

How to read the diagram from Web Technology Surveys:
73.5% of the websites use none of the content management systems that we monitor.
WordPress is used by 14.5% of all the websites, that is a content management system market share of 54.6%.

So although most websites surveyed didn’t use a content management system that could be detected, of those that could WordPress was again the clear leader.