WordPress Stats Redesign with New Insights

WordPress.org Statistics page has a fresh new design. And it has a new “Local Data” section presenting the active installs segmentation by language.

 

WordPress Stats Updates

The good old pie charts are now using subtle colors making it easy for the eye. They also use larger charts to help you distinguish between the inner items.

In addition, they added a new “Local Data” chart. The data was always collected by api.wordpress.org but it was never shared publicly. Up until now.

 

new-wordpress-stats-page

 

Data Source

Every WordPress site in the world needs to check whether it uses the latest version. This is why WordPress has a 12 hours cron job that send your site data to check for newer versions. The data it sends is the core version of your current install, installed plugin list with their versions and installed themes list with versions. It also sends server data like PHP and MySQL versions to check for compatibility. Other information like translation files is also being sent.

The wp.org API compares the data from your site to the latest data it holds in it’s servers, and returns a response telling your site whether it needs to be updated or if any of the plugins/themes need to be updated.

The data received from all the WordPress sites is stored on wp.org servers. Some of the data is presented on the stats page. Other data is used to show the plugin/theme active installs.

Extracting these stats is not an easy task, in the past the data was used as a whole to show the statistics. Now they remove sites that are no longer active, usually sites that stopped checking updated for newer versions, and haven’t sent any request for the last 6 months.

 

Insights

The latest WordPress version used only by 40% of all active WordPress websites. Over 85% are using 4.0+ versions. And 92% are using 3.7+ versions – this is important because WordPress installs from version 3.7 and newer are receiving automatic updates for security issues.

There are lot’s of PHP versions in use. Over 60% use unsupported PHP versions (5.2 – 5.4). And Next week, on July 10th, the support of PHP 5.5 will end. This means that next week 80% of all the WordPress websites in the world will use unsupported PHP versions.

Over 15% of the websites are using unsupported MySQL versions (5.0 – 5.1). Seems like WordPress core can already update it’s minimum requirements, as it is usually stop supporting obsolete versions that used by less then 5% of the WordPress sites. MySQL 5.0 is used by only 4.4% sites.

The newly “Local Data” section present the active installs segmentation by language. The most popular WordPress language in use is the English language (55%), followed by Japanese (5.7%) and German (4.9%). The data is also available through https://api.wordpress.org/stats/locale/1.0/.

If you have more insights I’ve missed, do share them on the comments area below.

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Rami Yushuvaev

Rami Yushuvaev

I'm an entrepreneur, a web developer and a blogger. I’ve contributed code to each and every release since WordPress 2.8. I'm the Hebrew GTE responsible for the translation and the release of WordPress Hebrew version. The founder GenerateWP.com and several other WordPress related projects. I work mainly with Israeli startups and hi-tech companies, providing development services.

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