The Big Stats Roundup Of The Year 2023
The new year is looming, which can only mean one thing. Another annual roundup post!
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The new year is looming, which can only mean one thing. Another annual roundup post!
As usual, the year has flown by in a blur. It can be hard to keep up with the latest facts and figures.
So here’s a little roundup of some of the more interesting digital industry stats and releases from 2023.
Just like Impact Media, WordPress celebrated its 20th birthday in May 2023. They celebrated with numerous meet-up events worldwide.
Alongside the major version updates, there are numerous releases throughout the year. These include the various betas and release candidates for each new version, to allow for community testing. Aside from these, there are important maintenance and security releases that introduce bug fixes and security patches.
As you can see, the WordPress team have been busy:
WordPress market share has stayed fairly consistent in 2023, with just a 1% drop to 62.7% CMS market share (from 63.9% last year) and is behind 42.9% of all known websites (43% last year). Still very much the market leader.
It was a big year for WooCommerce performance improvements, with High-Performance Order Storage finally being implemented as default in all WooCommerce installations from version 8.0 onwards. Version 8 was released in August 2023.
If you’d like to learn more about HPOS, we have a blog on the topic here.
There are currently 59,755 free plugins available from the WordPress plugin directory. Slightly down from 60,034 last year.
Don’t forget to 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.
As of October 2023, there were an incredible 5.3 billion active internet users worldwide, up from 5.03 billion last year. That is 65.7% of the global population!
The devices that those 5.3 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.
The breakdown of market share for the major platforms looks like this:
Based on active users, the list looks more like this:
Here are the screen resolutions that were dominant in 2023.
This year saw Universal Analytics finally sunset in July and GA4 take over as Google’s Analytics platform. Over the last couple of years, we’ve helped many clients migrate across to GA4 to prepare them for this change.
Google recently announced that they are removing signals from the reporting identity in GA4 properties in February 2024. It will be interesting to see what other changes come to the platform over the coming year.
What industry-related news or stats have you found most fascinating this year?