One of the most amazing statistics I have ever read, I read while reading this book—15 percent of the web now runs on WordPress.

The impact of this statistic is staggering. The size of that two-digit percentage, when multiplied by the entire Internet is so vast as to be incomprehensible. Yet the bigger imponderable the greater statistic comes when we realize that 100 percent minus 15 percent is 85 percent. That 85 percent has yet to discover WordPress.

In my career, I deal with web statistics every day. At Packt we publish books on IT and web technologies, and so it is to the web that we go for our research to base our assumptions of what is popular, what is worth spending our time, and an author's time on the technologies that will sell books. WordPress is virtually unique in that its popularity grows steeply and almost linearly over time, right from day one, and has done so for the last eight years, up, up, and up. Eating up the Internet bit by bit like an unstoppable virus. One might be forgiven for thinking the whole of that other 85 percent might succumb given time.