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New WordPress infographic with many new stats revealed for the first time. Total releases, total downloads, supported versions ratio, release cycle efficiency, gender ratio in version naming and more.

DisplayWP Infographic

For the last 4.5 years DisplayWP added new WordPress related data-sets (for the open source wp.org version, not wp.com). Then all the data was re-organized and visually displayed as charts to make it easy to recognize patterns. Today DisplayWP reveals the third piece of the puzzle – looking from above and extracting new insights never seen before.

Hopefully this will be the first of many infographics to come as there are many more data sets to cover. I should add that most of the insights revealed for the first time, you won’t find them anywhere else.

New Insights

WordPress Releases

Did you know that WordPress had 458 releases? 39 major versions and 419 minor versions.

Downloads

Did you know that the average WordPress version (major release with all its minor versions) is downloaded approximately 47 million times?

Did you know that the most popular release with the highest number of downloads is WordPress 4.9? it was download over 238 million.

Support Period

Did you know that the WordPress handled claims that “WordPress is not secure” by offering longer support period?

All major WordPress versions since 2013 receive security updates for every discovered vulnerability. Then the updates are automatically uploaded to your site! You don’t have to do anything, your site hardens its security by himself.

In other words, WordPress offers 7 years of support for old versions, making the web secure even for sites that don’t actively upgrade to new versions.

Versions Usage

Did you know that if you examine how many sites use which version, you will discover that less than 2% of all active WordPress websites use 3.x versions and less than 5% use WordPress 4.4 and below.

Should WordPress drop support for those scarcely used versions? or should they continue supporting those versions to make the web secure? What’s more important, usage or security? What’s the threshold? Should there be a threshold?

Versions Lifespan

How about the “release cycle” efficiency? So, the long time passed between releasing WordPress 2.0 and WordPress 2.1 forced core developers to adopt a regular release cycle every 3-4 months.

Did you know that only 15% of all the releases had a 91-120 days release cycle? 85% are out of this range. What does it mean for developers when they plan their release scheduled? I don’t know, but they should be aware of the statistics when planning future roadmaps.

The Music Behind WordPress

How about version naming? Major WordPress versions are named in honor of famous jazz musicians. But only 6 WordPress versions (15.79%) are named after female musicians. The gender ratio is 1 : 5.33, only one version called after a female musician for every 5.33 versions called after a male musicians!

Those are horrible facts and we can assume it was not intentionally, but until today nobody knew about this. This is how “Data Driven Decision Making” works, you see the data before deciding how to act and what to do.

Translations & Localization

What about i18n? Do you know how hard it is to translate WordPress to new languages? Well, over time it got even harder. With almost 8,000 translation strings, and over 100 thousand words, it’s almost impossible to translate WordPress to new languages. This is why we see more locale added but less locale translated.

The Infographic

Click the image to see the infographic.

Feel free to share the image, quote the insights and spread the word. If you find a mistake or have other insights, share them in the comments area below!

Update

After the initial release, the infographic was translated to several more languages with the help of wp-translations.pro team.

More translated infographics will be published in the coming days.