WordPress manages to take the lion’s share of the market. The tool accounts for 59.7% of software-built websites and rightfully earns the title of “most popular CMS” seven years in a row. Their closest rival, Joomla, holds second place with 6.7%.

Judging by the numbers, it doesn’t sound like much of a competition, does it?

WordPress is largely in a league of its own. That is mostly due to WP being the Swiss knife of web builders while competing solutions prefer to focus on a single purpose. The open-source nature and plugin architecture allows developers to take a bare bones installation and turn it into an online shop, a photo gallery, a news website, or anything else you might imagine.

According to the WordCamp site, there are currently over 75 million sites that use WordPress.

Every WordPress site needs a theme to pull content from the database and display that in a design. And theoretically you could run a site with just a theme and nothing else. But that site would be very limited without the addition of plugins.

Plugins add extra functionality to your WordPress site over and above what comes with WordPress core. Everything from a booking calendar or animated slider to a full-featured learning management system or online marketplace—you can add them all to your site with plugins.