WordPress Trends in Japan

WordPress’s World Market Share

WordPress has a commanding 70% share in the world CMS (Content Management System) sector. Up until a few years ago, MovableType held over half of the market share, but in just a few years that share has fallen to around 1%. The background to this massive shift in the market is the cloudification of websites.

There was a time when webservers were on-premises server-information operations, and CMS licenses were budgeted and purchased along with the servers themselves. Now, most websites are built and run via cloud services, so open-source CMSs that can handle cloud-based accounting and construction are much more popular. Among these, WordPress has nearly 50,000 free plugins and themes, allowing for impressive website builds with no licensing fees. These advantages have led to it taking an enormous share of the market in the last few years.

Now, let’s take a look at the share as of October, 2019.

Currently, the former market leader MovableType has dropped to 0.013%.
W3Techs　MovableType Share: https://w3techs.com/technologies/details/cm-movabletype/

The current #1, WordPress, With 61.6% of the worldwide market share, has a 55% lead over the #2 service, Joomla.

WordPress in Japan

When we look at the domestic market as well, WordPress as an even large share.

The Japanese WordPress community is extremely active, and there are over 100 study groups held all over the country every year. In particular, WordCamp Japan serves as a core event that is held all over Japan and attracts large numbers of attendees. This highly active community is one reason for WordPress’s particularly high market share in Japan.
WordCamp Japan: https://japan.wordcamp.org/

One interesting feature of the Japanese market is the large number of WordPress related publications in Japan. Right now, there are over 100 WordPress publications sold in Japan.
A list of Japan’s WordPress publications:
https://www.amazon.co.jp/s?k=WordPress

Among these, the WordPress no Kyoukasho (WordPress Textbook) series is a major hit, with a total of over 40,000 books sold, and versions released in Indonesia and Korea.

This textbook was written by the top WordPress cloud integrator in Japan, Prime Strategy, and is particularly attractive in that it allows even beginners to learn how to make a fully functional WordPress site as they go through it. Since there are already a lot of introductory textbooks on the market, in the future we can expect this market to grow and mature.

KUSANAGI is an execution environment that supports WordPress and other CMSs, and comes fine-tuned for speed and security out of the box. It allows execution speeds up to 10 x faster than normal, depending on the usage environment. WordPress performance always degrades as content volume increases, but KUSANAGI allows this weakness to be shored up, and preventing WordPress from slowing down makes it particularly popular with large enterprises. KUSANAGI is available on about 30 major cloud platforms in Japan and around the world. One reason for its increasing popularity is that it’s free to use, and this is sure to help promote the further adoption of WordPress.

KUSANAGI: https://kusanagi.tokyo/

Clearly, there is a place to leverage overseas WordPress experience in Japan’s IT business.

Tadashi Yoshimasa