Nearly every website developer servicing small business builds a WordPress site and sets it up on a hosting company's cPanel install with phpmyadmin running by default.
Which are far far outnumbered by people setting up squarespace sites, or shopify sites or facebook pages or twitter profiles these days.
It was definitely true at one point that small scale indie web devs and small business contractors outnumbered big tech in both headcount and servers. I don't think that's been true for a while now.
- nih.gov - It's using Drupal, per a meta generator tag
- forbes.com - No real for or against evidence, though the lack of any wp- paths leans a little more against it being wordpress
- archive.org - It's some type of react app, not wordpress. Probably home grown
- nginx.org - Just... no.
- ebay.com - Would it surprise you, no.
I have serious questions about their methodology.
Similarly, just because sites like Techcrunch use Wordpress, doesn't mean they're doing it by having someone upload files over FTP to some cPanel managed Godaddy account.
Most of those do in fact seem to use WordPress for part of their site:
* microsoft.com – uses WP at devblogs.microsoft.com
* digicert.com – may be a false positive, they link to files at /wp-content/ URLs, maybe they used WP in the past and kept the URLs?
* mozilla.org – uses WP at blog.mozilla.org
* nih.gov – uses WP at directorsblog.nih.gov
* forbes.com – can’t tell, my ad blocker breaks their cookie consent screen
* archive.org – uses WP at blog.archive.org
* nginx.org – uses WP at blog.nginx.org
* ebay.com – may be false positive?
We end up with 2/10 potential false positives, and one unknown (and even then, those are huge sites, who knows if they’ve got WP hiding under some deeply-buried subdomain).
I agree with you that Microsoft and TechCrunch probably aren’t FTPing their files in, but even if we assume that only 50% of WordPress sites are doing so, that’s still more websites than the next 10 competitors, combined!
If you think about it, this makes sense: do you reckon your local small businesses have a TechCrunch-level web presence, or are they using GoDaddy? Now consider that there exist many more local businesses than TechCrunches.
I serve a cPanel hosting, some people just want something up and running now which cPanel provides.
With Softaculous for automatic installation of scripts it's still widely popular for Wordpress installations. Web hosting is however a very dead market to startup in.
