Recently we talked about the state of the WordPress community in Australia on this blog. The tightly-knit community is remarkable for a country divided by lots of open space.
In this post, we want to continue with the theme of WordPress and Australia. However, instead of talking about the community, we want to put the focus on the results they produce. By now, a bunch of prominent and large Australian websites run on WordPress.
We have already talked about enterprise-level WordPress sites. In this article, we want to take this a little further and showcase a number of these sites. The goal is to show both how far the CMS has come Down Under and also list more examples of the platform managing to run large web entities.
Ready to get started? Then let’s do it.
WordPress Usage in Australia – Some General Information
Before getting into existing enterprise-level WordPress sites in Australia, let’s take a gander at what the WordPress landscape generally looks like down under.
First of all, Australia is a technologically advanced market. With 85.1 percent, the country’s Internet penetration rate is very high. Considering that, it’s even more impressive that WordPress is the leading technology to built websites in Australia with 67.55 percent market share (Joomla is a far second with a little more than 6 percent). Almost 170,000 registered domains in Australia run WordPress sites. Not bad, huh?
In addition to that, Australian’s are the fourth largest user group of WordPress.com. In May of this year, WordPress was also ranked number 44 of the most popular websites of Australia However, because at the time of this writing it’s no longer on the list, we can’t say whether we are talking about WordPress.com or WordPress.org.
Yet, what we can say is that the CMS is quite popular in the land down under (I was wondering if I could get through this article without linking to Men at Work’s song, but seems like I can’t). As a consequence, it’s probably not surprising that some of their biggest websites run on the platform.
Australian Enterprise Sites Built Based on WordPress
In the following, we will list a number of enterprise-level websites built with WordPress and belonging to Australian companies, organizations or individuals. We will also give you a bit more information about their size and technology to see what the CMS is handling in each case.
CSIRO Blog
CSIRO stands for “Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization.” It’s a large research company and Australia’s largest patent holder.
While their main site runs on something else, the large company blog is WordPress based. As you can see from the screenshot, it is very image centric which means it uses a lot of bandwidth.
In addition to that, look into the sitemap reveals that the blog consists of thousands of posts contributed by a large number of authors. TrafficEstimate.com predicts that it brings in about 40,000 visitors a month, which is a solid number.
Behind the scenes, the blog is based on the Genesis theme (follow the link for our beginner’s guide). As a consequence, it runs many Genesis-specific plugins but also popular favorites like Jetpack, Jetpack for WooCommerce and Yoast SEO.
Herald Sun
The website of the Herald Sun tabloid newspaper also runs on WordPress. Melbourne’s best-selling newspaper covers a wide range of topics and their site consequently has thousands of posts and pages. Plus, they obviously have lots of image material that need to load quickly.
The website reaches 2.2 million readers every month and appears to be hosted on WordPress.com VIP. Unfortunately, that means we can’t find out much about the exact technology that makes it tick. It runs on an unknown theme and I couldn’t detect any plugins. Yet, it’s large and uses WordPress, so it fits our category.
The Australian
Another newspaper outlet, the Australian is one of the country’s leading news brands and covers everything from business to sports, tech, and media.
Unsurprisingly, their sitemap contains thousands of entries and the site brings in around 2.1 million visitors every month. Also, it should be noted that it has one of the best 404 error pages I have seen in my life (which I found out by accident):
Apart from that, we don’t have much information about the technology as this site also resides on WordPress.com VIP (I told you WordPress was popular in Australia).
Daily Telegraph
We are continuing with the theme of news with another tabloid paper. Again, we have a site that consists of thousands of pages covering all sorts of areas of news and is based in Sydney.
The Daily Telegraph website gets about 1.8 million hits per month, delivers live streams and updates often (as is normal for news site). As such, it needs the infrastructure in the back to make it work, which it has in the form of WordPress VIP. Yes, another news site on VIP, I’m starting to see a pattern here.
Craftbits
Moving on from the news sector, our next example is a do-it-yourself craft website run by a mother and daughter team. It has existed since 1999 and is located in Brisbane, Australia.
The site provides anything from knitting and crochet patterns to jewelry making tips and self-made gifts for all holidays and occasions. As you can imagine, that’s a lot of material, which results in loads of pages. They also draw in impressive traffic numbers, somewhere between 70,000 and 100,000 visitors come by looking for DIY tips during a given month.
Aside from that, Craftbits also runs the Genesis theme and its plugins include Lazy Load, Jetpack for WooCommerce, WYSIJA Newsletters (MailPoet) and Google Sitemap Generator.
SitePoint
SitePoint is a large blog for all things web and based in Collingwood, Australia. They write about web design, programming languages, WordPress, SEO, and more. The site also offers courses and ebooks.
Sitepoint has 18 post sitemaps, each containing about a thousand URLs. As a consequence, they bring in impressive visitor numbers: around 10 million and more. I let you figure out whether this counts as enterprise-level or not.
As for technology, the site uses their own theme, so we don’t have much information about it. However, we know that they use Yoast SEO, Akismet and W3 Total Cache among others.
Digital Photography School
DPS is one of the projects of Darren Rowse, the founder of Problogger. While Problogger is arguably one of the biggest blogs on the net, Darren states that Digital Photography School is actually several times bigger both in terms of traffic as well as income (about eight times higher in 2016).
It’s a large site. The blog contains almost 7,000 posts and traffic estimates are around 1.7 million visitors per month.
It appears to be running a child theme of an unknown parent. Plugins on the site include Yoast SEO, Jetpack, Akismet, Sucuri Security, User Role Editor, W3 Total Cache, Yet Another Related Posts Plugin, and Thrive Visual Editor.
Still in awe of what people can do with a free piece of software like WordPress? Me too.
In a Nutshell
Lately, we have seen that Australia has quite a vibrant WordPress scene. That’s not only apparent in its increasing WordPress-related events but also Australia-based websites built with the platform.
Above, we have listed a number of use cases of large sites running on WordPress. Many of them have thousands of pages and sometimes millions of monthly visitors. Yet, all of them are running on a free, open source piece of software.
While the country is not alone with this trend, it’s nice to see things are going well for WordPress Down Under as well. Who knows, maybe one day WordCamp Australia will play in the same league as WordCamp US and Europe.
Do you know any other examples of enterprise-level WordPress sites based in Australia? If so, please let us know in the comments section below.
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