What percentage of all websites run on WordPress?

How to get close to this number

Reason from the alternatives. A handful of content management systems compete for the market, one has been the default recommendation for two decades, and the rest split the remainder. A dominant incumbent in a market with a long tail typically holds somewhere around forty percent, which is where this sits.

The comparison in the explanation is the one that conveys the dominance: comfortably ahead of every other content management system combined. A single piece of open-source software running a plurality of the web is an unusual concentration for something with no company mandating its use.

The recent decline is the detail worth noting: down slightly from a peak above forty-three percent. This site is part of that shift — a static site generator produces files with no database and no admin login, which removes the attack surface described in the hacked-websites question here. Market share is moving toward architectures with less to compromise.