The growing popularity among the web development community of WordPress, an open website content management system (CMS), is confirmed with the news that 14.7% of the world’s million best performing websites currently rely on the facility.

The statistic, revealed by WordPress founder, Matt Mullenweg during a recent industry conference, is all the more impressive when contrasted against the equivalent figure for 2010; then, WordPress accounted for just 8.5% of the CMS applications of the top million global websites.

WordPress, which was first launched back in May 2003, is currently used by more than 50 million websites across the globe, and is also chosen as the preferred CMS by 22 out of every 100 new websites.

According to survey research carried out on behalf of WordPress itself, and which canvassed the views of 18,000 users and developers of WordPress across the globe, one of the key reasons for preferring WordPress was ‘ease of use’; a top reason given by web developers, and a view echoed by one in five users.

The same survey also found, however, that there was much confusion surrounding the plethora of plug-ins (or add-on software elements) available for WordPress. Some of these plug-ins were out of date and some not even functional any more; and with 15,000 to choose from, the task of identifying the correct version was proving extremely hard going.

WordPress claims however to have responded to this criticism by henceforward hiding from any search results any plug-ins which have not been used for two years or more.