Years ago I worked on a project with my dad to invent a new machine for a specific type of scientific testing. The goal was to make the best machine for testing the properties of bearing materials in the world. No problem, right?

My dad designed and built the machine. I did the programming. His design was solid, but we didn’t know exactly how it should work. How did we know it was getting good data? What is good data anyway? What happens when we have it? When you’re inventing something that’s never existed, these are tougher questions to answer than it might seem.

To answer these questions we recorded data. A lot of data. As in, stare at charts and graphs of data for hours, days, weeks, and months. I try not to think about how much time of our lives we spent staring at charts and talking about what we saw.

During this time we came to multiple conclusions. Many of them mostly wrong, but enough right to lead us to our next theory. In all, I started the code from scratch six times to pursue our next hypothesis.

I learned something key in this experience: Data does not come equipped with conclusions — it only proves or disproves theories. It’s way too easy to come up with false conclusions and blame the data. You have to know your data and all its assumptions. What it does tell you and what it doesn’t.

WordPress usage statistics

WordPress is the most widely used CMS in the world. WordPress, and it’s founder Matt, are very proud of this fact1. According to W3Techs, 62.9% of all known CMS systems and 43.1% of all websites use WordPress2. That is impressive and something worth being proud of.

It does beg the question though: How did W3Techs arrive at that conclusion? You’ll notice on their website that when providing these stats, they include some qualifying language such as “whose content management systems we know”3. Dig a bit further and you’ll find they were nice enough to provide a general technologies page for further qualifying their data4.

I’d like to call out one particular point from this page:

We do not consider subdomains to be separate websites. For instance, sub1.example.com and sub2.example.com are considered to belong to the same site as example.com. That means for example, that all the subdomains of wix.com, wordpress.com and similar sites are counted only as one website.

That’s pretty remarkable! They give an example of how this would tug the data in both directions, nevertheless, it’s quite a qualifier! Consider this, when searching for something on Google, the average user likely thinks of each result as a website. According to this qualifier, if that website is a subdomain, then it doesn’t count as more than one website, even though it intuitively would to the user.

My purpose here isn’t to pick on their qualifiers, but to point out how quickly a single qualifier can take the same data and drive towards a different conclusion. Let’s take this a step further.

What is a website, anyway?

This whole thing raises the question as to what a website even is. Years ago, it was fairly easy to define. Dictionary.com defines it as:

a connected group of pages on the World Wide Web regarded as a single entity, usually maintained by one person or organization and devoted to a single topic or several closely related topics.5

It used to be that you’d buy some hosting and a domain, add some files and, boom, website. Maybe it had one page, maybe it had many. It was publicly discoverable (usually via search engine), and you could send people to it. This was a bit complex, so people hired professionals and their cousin’s kiddo to set it all up and build their websites for them. Hosting companies made billions and people got their little slice of the Internet.

I want my stuff online, but I don’t know what that means

The fact that it was complex continued to eat at people. For example, a person might want to accept donations for a medical emergency. They want a way to send friends and family to a place online and then collect money. They don’t know what any of that really means, but that’s what they want.

GoFundMe strategized that this was the case and boy were they right. They currently have 33.92% of the crowdfunding market share6. Within minutes, a person could be collecting donations for their cause with a sharable link. They didn’t have to know a thing about hosting, content marketing, accepting payments, and so forth. Pretty amazing!

This model of being a website that makes websites is called Software as a Service (or SaaS). They handle all the hosting and whatnot, and you get your website.

Do SaaS platforms make websites?

I purposely said they’re websites that make “websites”. But is this true? I suppose some would argue that GoFundMe only makes “webpages” for people, because it’s just one. But, don’t some websites only have a single page? Ok, but they don’t have their own domain. But many SaaS platforms do allow you to provide your own unique domain.

There are strict, technical definitions for all of these things. But let’s be honest, 99% of the users of the Internet don’t care one bit for those definitions. What they care about is the ability to find and share bits of the Internet that they call their own.

Concluding thoughts

This makes me really question the statistics for WordPress. So much of the Internet is disqualified, which I would guess inflates the numbers. As the Internet becomes more broadly accessible, many of these definitions are going to have to adapt to what people understand. Or perhaps websites, as strictly defined, are simply going to become less and less common as most people don’t want to deal with the hassle of setting one up and maintaining it.

I don’t think WordPress and websites are going away, but I do believe it will become but a sub-category of what makes up the Internet. Most users, including organizations, in my estimation, venture into the Internet with a specific goal and purpose — which is virtually never to have a website for its own sake. They don’t care about whether they “have a website” or not, so long as their goals are achievable and they can share what they have.

There’s nuance, but it’s worth being aware of what the data about the Internet is really telling us about our conclusions.

  1. See this moment at the State of the Word: https://youtu.be/c7M4mBVgP3Y?si=3319eiQBqblwNBPc&t=397 ↩︎
  2. See https://w3techs.com/technologies/details/cm-wordpress ↩︎
  3. Ibid ↩︎
  4. See https://w3techs.com/technologies ↩︎
  5. See https://www.dictionary.com/browse/website ↩︎
  6. See https://6sense.com/tech/crowdfunding/gofundme-market-share ↩︎

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