WordPress is turning 21 years old!
WordPress was born on the 27th of May 2003 and had humble beginnings as an open-source blogging platform. Since then, it has grown into one of the most powerful and flexible platforms available to build websites. WordPress currently powers over 40% of all websites on the internet today. It’s been an incredible journey to a fully fledged Content Management System (CMS).
Don’t forget that, if you want to find out more about WordPress (including how to do a whole bunch of stuff), we’ve got a large number of blog posts about WordPress. We love giving stuff away for free (hence the blogs), so if you’ve got a question that our blogs don’t answer, you can always ask us for more help under our free advice offer 😉
A Brief History
WordPress was founded by Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little, who seized the opportunity to create a better and more accessible blogging platform. WordPress has since evolved through countless updates, bringing new features, improvements, enhanced security, and better usability. Because WordPress has always been open-source, droves of experienced developers have been able to contribute to its ongoing development and success.
Due to its open-source nature, developers the world over have built tens of thousands of incredible plugins and themes, contributed countless bug fixes and improvements, and generally kept WordPress relevant and immensely popular for over two decades.
Open-source, for those not “in the know”, basically means “free, for all.” Anyone can use it, without being charged, and it’s a group effort to keep it working, and expand it. Anyone can modify, inspect, or enhance open-source software. Another example of great open-source software is Libre Office – which we’re big fans of (it’s a bit like Microsoft Office, but free!).
WordPress in Numbers
WordPress powers over 40% of all websites, making it the most popular CMS by a significant margin.
There are more than 60,000 plugins available for WordPress and over 20,000 themes.
The WordPress community hosts hundreds of events annually, from developer events all the way to marketing and content creation.
The Future
As WordPress surges into its 22nd year, it’s showing no signs of slowing down. The latest updates continue to boost its performance and security. It even offers some neat headless features (if you’re that way inclined), and it continues to dominate market share. It’s safe to say WordPress is here to stay and will continue to be the prime contender when it comes to content management systems.
What About Sox?
Graham first used WordPress back in 2014, when it was at version 4. At the time,he was working commercially with Drupal and didn’t have a huge exposure to WordPress. Shortly after version 4 was released, he started to tinker with it and immediately saw the value of WordPress to the average user.
Since then, WordPress has continued to evolve and, in his opinion, represents the best general-purpose content management system available.
Graham recently said:
“Generally speaking, WordPress is the perfect jack of all trades. With a good quality lightweight theme like GeneratePress, an easy-to-use site builder like Elementor, and some basic plugins, anyone can build a site that’ll work for any business. As long as you’re not trying to shoehorn in functionality that goes against the grain, your site will be easy to maintain for years.”
Graham Howe, Co-Founder, Sox Digital
While we do work with many other systems and platforms, when someone comes to us for a bog standard website, our first port of call is always WordPress. We don’t see that changing anytime soon, it just keeps getting better!
Happy birthday, WordPress!