WordPress at 20
Today is the 20th anniversary of the first release of WordPress. None of us knew what we were getting into when it started, but we had a shared conviction that the four freedoms of the GPL combined with a mission to democratize publishing was something worth spending our time on.
The software’s first official release (WordPress 1.0) was made available on May 27, 2003. I had been using the software for a little longer when it was still in alpha. In 2004, I switched my old website to WordPress, becoming the first major blog to embrace the platform. Considering obsolescence is a given, nothing lasts that long in the technology industry. It might not be as nimble or as basic as it started out, but it can still do one thing — help me maintain a homestead on the Internet, not controlled or defined by a platform.
I, for one, never would have predicted that WordPress would grow to become, by far, the most popular CMS in the world, and the foundation of a thriving company whose primary goal is making the web a better platform.
Previously:
Update (2023-06-02): Hide Shidara (via Hacker News):
Out of a sample set of 600+ pre-seed to seed stage startups we’ve found that 29 startups still use WordPress and various plugins. At this point marketing site architecture is outsourced to no-code tools like WP and Webflow, so I expect that 100% of these startups are just using WP as a blog, hiring board, or a landing page builder.
