We run a WordPress hosting company in the EU, and after our count of WordPress in Germany we wanted to know whether Germany is typical. So we ran the same count for 31 more European countries from the same Common Crawl crawl.
The full results are in the report WordPress in Europe: hosts, versions and plugins, with the method, the limits, an interactive map and two CSV files you can reuse.
Of 4,096,194 homepages on the country domains of 32 European countries, 1,949,558 run WordPress, which is 47.6%. The share is highest in Estonia and Lithuania at about 59% and lowest in Czechia at 35%, with Norway and the United Kingdom not far above it.
So WordPress is between a third and more than half of the web in every larger country we counted, even though their hosting markets look very different.
Hosting looks different in every country
We expected a few big international hosts everywhere, but most countries have their own leaders. In Lithuania, Hostinger alone serves 74.3% of the WordPress sites, and in Slovakia Websupport serves 63.9%.
In the Netherlands the largest host serves only 8.8% and the top three are almost level. The UK and Ireland stand out in another way, because about one WordPress site in five sits behind a CDN that hides the real host, compared with 2.8% in Germany.
Old software is common everywhere
21.6% of the WordPress sites run a version older than 6.9. Of the sites that show their PHP version, 23.0% still run PHP 7, which stopped getting security fixes in November 2022.
The difference between countries is large, because only 7.9% of Danish sites that show PHP are on PHP 7 against 43.8% of Latvian ones. Shops differ too, since WooCommerce runs on 5.9% of German WordPress sites and on 23.6% of Estonian ones.
If your site runs a WordPress version older than 6.9 or PHP 7, update those two first, because they are the cheapest security fix you can make.