W3Techs today released its list of ‘Web Technologies of the Year 2016,’ and once again, for the seventh consecutive year, WordPress earned the spot as CMS of the year. WordPress is accompanied on the list by other leading web technologies, like Google Analytics, Ubuntu, Amazon, and CloudFlare. The list is determined by the largest increase in usage in the last year, in which W3Techs “compared the number of sites using a technology on January 1st, 2016 with the corresponding number on January 1st, 2017.”
WordPress has more than doubled since it first took the spot of CMS of the year in 2010, demonstrating unstoppable growth and dynamic ability as a full-service application.
At the start of 2016, WordPress was used by 25.6 percent of all websites and by the end was used by 27.3 percent — experiencing a 1.7 percent growth. For perspective, this is more than eight times the increase of the second place CMS, Shopify, which experienced a .2 percent increase over the year.
WordPress’s user-friendliness and extensibility make it the leading choice for small and enterprise sites alike. In fact, a whopping 60 percent of the top-100 sites on Inc’s 5000 2016 use WordPress, and the CMS is used by brands across all industries including Greenpeace, Microsoft, and even the Guggenheim.
Even more, the server-side programming language of 2016 was PHP, which may, at least in part, be due to the fact that it is the main programming language of WordPress and also because of its low barrier to entry. JavaScript took second place, with a .1 percent increase in usage.
WordPress’s increase in usage shows no indication of slowing any time soon. With the recent inclusion of the REST API content endpoints in the core software, WordPress has more growth potentnial than ever before. The REST API acts as a universal connector that opens up a direct line of communication between WordPress and virtually any other web property, regardless of the language it’s written in. This makes WordPress development easier and more flexible. This combined with the adoption of WordPress among leading brands will likely lead to an even greater adoption rate in 2017.
Other ‘technologies of the year’ who earned top spots include CloudFlare as reverse proxy provider of the year, Bootstrap as JavaScript library of the year, and Ubuntu as operating system of the year. You can view the full list here.
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