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The new year is looming, which can only mean one thing. Another annual roundup post!
Edit: You can find our 2025 roundup here.
As another year flies by, it’s time to reflect on the digital industry’s most fascinating stats and developments from 2024. From platform milestones to market trends, here’s a roundup of key stats that defined the year in digital.
Whilst the WordPress CMS continues to evolve and grow, there was a little controversy this year due to the spat between Matt Mullenweg and WP Engine. This dispute highlights tensions within the WordPress ecosystem over how commercial entities balance profit-making with supporting open-source ideals.
However, this has had no impact on our clients, so for us it has been business as usual.
WordPress had another busy year with three major releases:
In addition to these major version updates, the countless maintenance and security updates kept the platform stable and secure, along with the various betas and release candidates for each new version, to allow for community testing.
As you can see, the WordPress team have been busy:
WordPress market share has remained consistent in 2024, with just a 0.5% drop to 62.2% CMS market share (from 62.7% last year) and is behind 43.7% of all known websites (42.9% last year). It is still very much the market leader.
WooCommerce continues to be a major player in the eCommerce market, keeping company with Shopify as the most popular platforms. Woo accounts for the eCommerce solution of choice for 93.7% of all WordPress eCommerce sites.
Woo has received several updates this year, taking us from version 8.4.1 at the start of the year, up to 9.4.3 at the time of writing.
The WooCommerce site we built for Fertility Family was nominated for 4 UK eCommerce Awards in 2024.
There are currently more than 59,000 free plugins available from the WordPress plugin directory.
Although, as an important reminder, be diligent when selecting plugins for use on your website. Look for highly rated, and well-maintained plugins, alongside compatibility with the latest version of WordPress.
Plugins that aren’t well maintained or that have been abandoned by their developers can lead to issues, incompatibility and vulnerabilities.
You can view this information on the plugin page within the directory.
As of October 2024, there were 5.52 billion active internet users worldwide, up from 5.3 billion last year. That is 67.5% of the global population (up from 65.7%)!
The devices that those 5.52 billion users use to access the internet split out like this:
This year, the browser market share across devices looks like this:
Breaking browser market share down further, this is the split across the 6 most popular browser versions:
The search engine landscape is obviously dominated by Google, although they have experienced a small drop again this year.
It is believed that in 2024, 59% of the global population uses social media.
The breakdown of market share for the major platforms looks like this:
LinkedIn has dropped out of the top 6, whilst Threads and Bluesky have not yet been added to the data, so it will be interesting to see where they sit next year.
Based on active users, the list looks more like this:
According to Statista, global digital advertising spend is predicted to hit over $740 billion in 2024, with Paid Search making up the largest contributor (over $3 billion).
It is not surprising that the US is the largest generator of ad spend globally (just shy of $3 billion). In the UK ad spend for 2024 is predicted to be $44.4 billion.
Here are the screen resolutions that were dominant in 2024.
2024 has been yet another year of remarkable growth and change in the digital space. It is vital that businesses and marketers stay agile to keep up with changing trends and constantly evolving technologies.
What industry-related news or stats have you found most interesting this year?
