Around the World in WordPress: The State of Indie Launches, September 2026
Published 5 October 2026
What is a new WordPress site built from?
18,793 indie launches analysed in September 2026. This month's feature compares 6,003 WordPress launches from the launch boards (April to September) with 585,887 WordPress sites from the wider web (July to September): their plugins, themes, hosts and countries.
Launch-board WordPress uses more Google and SEO tools
Previous issues covered launch-board sites, where WordPress is a small minority. Since July we've also crawled sites we discover ourselves, where it is the largest single platform.
Site Kit by Google is on 41.4% of WordPress launches on the boards and 11.9% of WordPress sites on the wider web. Elementor is on 48.2% and 42.2%, and Hostinger hosts 39.4% and 29.7%. In Japan, Elementor is on 3.7% of the WordPress sites we can place.
Five findings
- WordPress is 5% of launches and 16% of new sites. It is 5.3% of launch-board launches from April to September and 16.3% of the wider-web sites that went live in September. Of the September sites running a platform we can identify, 40.2% run WordPress.
- Launch-board WordPress uses more Google and SEO tools. Site Kit by Google is on 41.4% of board WordPress launches and 11.9% of wider-web WordPress sites. Elementor is common to both, at 48.2% and 42.2%.
- Hostinger hosts more new WordPress sites than the next ten hosts combined. It hosts 29.7% of wider-web WordPress sites and 39.4% on the boards. Elementor is on 61.4% of Hostinger's WordPress sites and 34.1% of everyone else's.
- Japan runs its own WordPress. Elementor is on 3.7% of the Japanese WordPress sites we can place, against 13% to 65% in every other country with 1,000 sites or more. Cocoon, a free theme from the Japanese host Xserver, is on 39.9%.
- WordPress launches score higher on readiness. They average 93.1 on Launch Readiness against 86.4 for other launches, with half the Vibe Score. WordPress is 14.5% of e-commerce launches and 2.0% of AI ones.
Methodology
The September cohort contains scored launches from Product Hunt, Hacker News Show HN and PeerPush. Each launch is assigned to its board, even if our crawler found it first. All 18,793 were crawled in September 2026. The crawl method is unchanged. Detection used 60,209 fingerprints at the end of September, up from 42,773 at the end of August. Full methodology at /methodology.
- Launch-board WordPress covers scored launches from April to September with WordPress detected: 6,003 launches, 90% of them from Product Hunt.
- Wider-web WordPress covers 585,887 sites our discovery crawl found going live from July to September. These have WordPress detected but are not scored. We usually crawl them close to launch.
Plugin and theme shares are lower bounds because we cannot detect software that leaves no trace on the page. Each comparison covers the full period listed above.
Shares are of each population's WordPress sites. Counts are lower than the all-time totals on the linked /tech pages.
The cohort
| Source | Launches | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Product Hunt | 16,195 | 86.2% |
| Hacker News (Show HN) | 1,690 | 9.0% |
| PeerPush | 908 | 4.8% |
| Total scored | 18,793 | 100% |
September's 18,793 scored launches compare with 18,465 in August. Product Hunt's share rose from 84.5% to 86.2%, and PeerPush's fell from 6.1% to 4.8%.
Why 5% and not 40%
W3Techs, which surveys established websites, puts WordPress on 40.2% of all websites and 58.6% of those with a known content management system.
On the launch boards, WordPress is 5.3% of launches from April to September, and between 4.8% and 6.4% in every month. Launch boards mostly carry software products, and few software products are built on WordPress (see below).
On the wider web, WordPress is on 16.3% of the 1,737,849 sites that went live in September. These sites are days old, and 59.3% run no site platform we can identify. Among the 40.7% that do, WordPress is 40.2%. The comparison with W3Techs still differs in site age and platform coverage.
| Platform | Sites | Share of platform-built |
|---|---|---|
| WordPress | 284,111 | 40.2% |
| Shopify | 130,312 | 18.4% |
| Wix | 76,185 | 10.8% |
| Squarespace | 29,138 | 4.1% |
| Hostinger AI Builder | 20,738 | 2.9% |
| Base44 | 20,576 | 2.9% |
| GoDaddy Airo | 10,389 | 1.5% |
| Replit | 6,878 | 1.0% |
Wider-web sites that went live in September 2026 and run a CMS, store platform, site builder or AI builder we detect: 707,453 sites. A site can run more than one.
Two WordPresses
Elementor is on 48.2% of board WordPress launches and 42.2% of wider-web WordPress sites. Elementor Pro, Contact Form 7 and Jetpack are within a point of each other in the two populations.
Site Kit by Google is on 41.4% of board launches and 11.9% of wider-web sites, Rank Math on 32.6% and 10.7%, Yoast on 26.0% and 13.0%, and a Google Search Console verification on 67.0% and 16.3%.
The wider web sells more. WooCommerce is on 22.0% of wider-web WordPress sites and 10.8% on the boards. Wider-web sites run fewer plugins: the typical board launch has three we can detect and 6.6% show none, while the typical wider-web site has two and 22.7% show none.
Crawl timing may explain some of the gap in search tools. Since 10 September we have usually reached wider-web sites within a day or two of going live. In August, when the domains we reached were typically about three weeks old, wider-web WordPress sites had Site Kit on 13% and no detectable plugin on about 20%. From mid-September those figures are 8% to 10% and 27% to 28%. Yoast held at 12% to 15% throughout. Even the older August sites ran Site Kit at a third of the board rate.
Hostinger's WordPress
Hostinger is on 174,018 wider-web WordPress sites, 29.7% of them, more than the next ten hosts we can identify put together. On the boards it is 39.4%.
| Host | Launch boards | Wider web |
|---|---|---|
| Hostinger | 39.4% | 29.7% |
| WordPress.com | 2.1% | 5.0% |
| IONOS | 1.2% | 2.4% |
| Xserver | 0.1% | 1.6% |
| HostGator | 2.4% | 1.5% |
| GoDaddy | 1.7% | 1.1% |
| Cloudways | 0.9% | 1.0% |
| 20i | 0.3% | 0.9% |
| WP Engine | 1.6% | 0.4% |
Shares of each population's WordPress sites. Many sites sit behind a CDN or on a server we can't attribute to a host, so the columns don't add up to 100%.
Elementor is on 61.4% of Hostinger's wider-web WordPress sites and 34.1% of the rest, and Astra on 18.8% against 9.4%. WooCommerce is level, at 22.7% and 21.7%.
Xserver, a Japanese host, carries 9,306 wider-web WordPress sites and 8 launch-board launches.
Around the world
We can place 101,835 of the 585,887 wider-web WordPress sites in a country at confidence 0.6 or better, 17.4% of them. Estimates favour sites with clear domain or language signals and undercount the United States. These counts do not measure each country's share of all WordPress sites.
Hosts help us estimate country, so we do not report hosts by country. We also exclude sites whose plugins, themes, store or payment tools count as country evidence, such as a Persian Elementor add-on or a Vietnamese payment gateway. That removes 3,080 sites, leaving 98,755 for the table below. Cocoon and Lightning are not used as country evidence, so their sites stay in.
| Estimated origin | Sites | Elementor | WooCommerce | Contact Form 7 | Yoast | Most common theme |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| India | 16,573 | 65.0% | 21.9% | 19.0% | 9.0% | Astra 25.0% |
| United Kingdom | 15,501 | 34.4% | 15.2% | 16.1% | 16.0% | Astra 9.0% |
| France | 13,929 | 35.3% | 12.9% | 14.5% | 24.6% | Astra 13.8% |
| Japan | 12,561 | 3.7% | 0.9% | 35.0% | 4.1% | Cocoon 39.9% |
| Canada | 5,395 | 38.1% | 12.8% | 14.8% | 16.0% | Astra 10.3% |
| United States | 3,248 | 40.8% | 27.6% | 17.6% | 9.8% | Astra 15.1% |
| Australia | 2,868 | 39.5% | 15.2% | 23.0% | 26.8% | Astra 10.5% |
| Germany | 2,867 | 24.0% | 12.5% | 14.2% | 21.2% | Astra 6.3% |
| Sweden | 2,693 | 22.2% | 12.3% | 10.2% | 15.0% | Astra 7.7% |
| Brazil | 2,639 | 62.3% | 12.0% | 10.9% | 15.6% | Astra 5.4% |
| Switzerland | 2,487 | 33.3% | 9.7% | 15.3% | 20.8% | Astra 9.7% |
| Poland | 2,472 | 25.1% | 12.7% | 19.1% | 18.8% | GeneratePress 10.8% |
| Italy | 2,060 | 30.7% | 15.3% | 22.6% | 26.1% | Astra 7.5% |
| Slovakia | 1,771 | 36.2% | 16.7% | 19.3% | 26.1% | Astra 10.2% |
| Vietnam | 1,554 | 13.4% | 49.4% | 59.5% | 20.8% | Flatsome 58.3% |
| Spain | 1,276 | 47.3% | 15.8% | 19.2% | 29.5% | Astra 11.9% |
| Netherlands | 1,200 | 26.9% | 16.3% | 18.3% | 24.5% | Astra 7.6% |
Wider-web WordPress sites that went live from July to September, placed at confidence 0.6 or better, after the exclusions above; countries with at least 1,000. Percentages are of that country's placed sites. The theme column is the most common theme we detect and its share.
Astra is the most common theme in 14 of these 17 countries, and Elementor is on between 22% and 65% of sites in 15 of them. India and Brazil use it most, at 65.0% and 62.3%. Yoast leads Rank Math in 14 of these 17 countries, including every European one. Rank Math leads in Vietnam (32.5% against 20.8%) and narrowly in India and the United States.
Japan runs its own WordPress
Elementor is on 3.7% of the 12,561 Japanese WordPress sites we can place. WooCommerce is on 0.9% and Yoast on 4.1%. Cocoon, a free theme that the host Xserver has developed since 2022, is on 39.9% of them. Lightning, from the Japanese company Vektor, is second at 4.1%. Contact Form 7 is on 35.0%.
Neither theme appears on the launch boards. Across the wider-web WordPress cohort, Cocoon is on 5,955 sites and Lightning on 1,594. Xserver hosts 8 board WordPress launches.
Vietnam sells on Flatsome
Flatsome, a WooCommerce theme, is on 58.3% of the 1,554 Vietnamese WordPress sites we can place, against 1.4% of wider-web WordPress overall. WooCommerce is on 49.4% and Contact Form 7 on 59.5%. Elementor is on 13.4%.
The boards agree
On the launch boards we can place 1,867 WordPress launches after the same exclusions, mostly in India (495), the United States (312) and the United Kingdom (199). Elementor is on 64.0% of Indian board launches and 65.0% of Indian wider-web sites, and on 41.3% and 40.8% for the United States.
What WordPress launches are
| Category | WordPress launches | Share of category | Against the 5.3% overall |
|---|---|---|---|
| Other | 950 | 17.4% | 3.3x |
| E-commerce | 136 | 14.5% | 2.8x |
| Directories | 91 | 7.3% | 1.4x |
| Marketing | 619 | 7.3% | 1.4x |
| Education | 289 | 6.5% | 1.2x |
| Health | 326 | 6.5% | 1.2x |
| Finance | 381 | 5.6% | 1.1x |
| Games | 144 | 5.0% | 0.9x |
| Design | 122 | 4.9% | 0.9x |
| Content | 212 | 4.9% | 0.9x |
| HR | 116 | 3.6% | 0.7x |
| Crypto | 52 | 3.5% | 0.7x |
| Productivity | 429 | 3.2% | 0.6x |
| Developer tools | 314 | 2.8% | 0.5x |
| AI | 193 | 2.0% | 0.4x |
| Social | 58 | 2.0% | 0.4x |
Launch-board launches from April to September with a high-confidence product category: 84,121, of which 4,432 run WordPress. The adoption clock covers 85,523 classified launches from all sources up to the day we ran it.
WordPress leans towards shops and marketing products. It is 14.5% of e-commerce launches and 7.3% of marketing tools, against 2.0% of AI launches.
| WordPress | Everything else | |
|---|---|---|
| Launches | 6,003 | 107,028 |
| Avg Launch Readiness | 93.1 | 86.4 |
| Avg Vibe Score | 14.6 | 29.6 |
| Avg StackScope score | 6.66 | 6.43 |
WordPress launches score higher on Launch Readiness, 93.1 against 86.4, and the gap holds on Product Hunt alone (93.1 and 85.8). The Vibe Score, which looks for signs that a site was built with an AI tool, is half the board average.
The adoption clock
Since June we've tracked each email tool's tech-share: the percentage of its users classified as technical builds. We're testing whether that share falls as a tool reaches a broader audience.
| Email tool | Users | Tech-share |
|---|---|---|
| Cloudflare Email Sending (beta) | 693 | 37% |
| Postmark | 152 | 28% |
| SendGrid | 2,309 | 28% |
| Mailgun | 1,005 | 28% |
| Amazon SES | 3,082 | 25% |
| Resend | 16,455 | 23% |
User counts are drawn from the 85,523 launches with a high-confidence product category.
Cloudflare Email Sending reached 1.38% of the September cohort, 259 launches, up from 1.27% in August, after 0.45% in June and 0.90% in July. Its tech-share was 48% in June, 42% in July, 38% in August and 37% in September.
Resend's tech-share was 23.4% in July, 22.6% in August and 22.0% in September. The technical baseline fell from 25.0% to 23.6%, narrowing Resend's gap to the baseline from 2.4 to 1.6 points. August's figures were revised from 23.0% and 25.3% to 22.6% and 25.0%.
Risers and fallers
| Field | August 2026 | September 2026 | Δ |
|---|---|---|---|
| Vercel hosting share | 29.1% | 26.2% | -2.9pp |
| Tailwind CSS adoption | 49.6% | 44.5% | -5.1pp |
| React adoption | 34.5% | 32.7% | -1.8pp |
| Next.js adoption | 33.8% | 32.0% | -1.8pp |
| Resend share of email | 17.8% | 17.3% | -0.5pp |
| Cloudflare Email Sending | 1.27% | 1.38% | +0.11pp |
| Named AI-builder cohort | 7.1% | 5.8% | -1.3pp |
| Lovable share of named cohort | 44.5% | 38.2% | -6.3pp |
| Avg Vibe Score (PH) | 28.0 | 25.6 | -2.4 |
| Avg Launch Readiness (PeerPush) | 93.3 | 93.1 | -0.2 |
| Avg Vibe Score (Show HN) | 16.6 | 15.1 | -1.5 |
Monthly cohort figures; pp means percentage points. The two-point cutoff is an editorial reporting threshold. Recent figures can change as further crawls arrive.
Four measures fell by more than two points this month: Tailwind, Vercel, Lovable's share of the named AI-builder cohort, and the average Vibe Score on Product Hunt.
We did not remove or narrow any Tailwind or Vercel detection rules. Unrelated signals held steady through September, making a broad crawler problem unlikely. Changes in how individual tools mark their pages could still affect detection. Tailwind, shadcn/ui, Vite and Lucide icons, which Lovable uses, fell together week by week. Detected Lovable launches fell from 3.5% of board launches in the first week of August to 1.8% in the last week of September. Lovable accounts for 415 launches this month against 588 in August, ahead of Base44 (171), Replit (115) and Framer (90).
Developer tools and AI were 23.6% of classified September launches, down from 25.0%. Vercel's share from April to September was 33.2%, 32.1%, 32.2%, 30.4%, 29.1% and 26.2%, seven points in five months. Tailwind's share since May was 53.9%, 52.0%, 51.1%, 49.6% and 44.5%.
Tuesday is launch day, mostly
Across the full corpus of 115,005 launches, Tuesday leads at 19.8% against Wednesday's 17.0%. Weekends are quieter, and Product Hunt accounts for the Tuesday peak. On PeerPush the week is close to flat, with Friday slightly ahead.
The claim funnel
116 founders have claimed their listing and triggered a recrawl, up from 93 at the end of August. Of the 96 we could compare cleanly, 60 shipped at least one observable fix. Median scores were 7.6 out of 10 before and 9.6 after. The median change per launch was 1.0 point.
The most-added items were a Referrer-Policy header (31), llms.txt (27), security.txt (27), a privacy policy (17) and robots.txt (7).
If you launched on Product Hunt, PeerPush or Show HN in September, find your listing on /browse. Claiming is free. The Launch Readiness Check runs the same analysis on any URL.
What's next
This is issue #6. The recurring shape holds: a monthly feature, the adoption clock, the deltas table, the day-of-week check, the claim funnel.
Next month we'll look at the JavaScript libraries new launches ship alongside their framework: jQuery, animation libraries and client-side routers. Anything bundled is hidden from us, so the shares will be lower bounds. Issue #7: Outside the Bundle.
Bookmark /blog.
Credits and links
Thanks to the PeerPush team for the ongoing integration support. WordPress's share of established websites is from W3Techs, 4 October 2026.
Explore the September data
- Find your launch: see how your September launch was scored.
- Claim a listing: verify ownership from your launch page and trigger a fresh crawl.
- WordPress in the catalogue: /tech/wordpress.
- Slice the trends: stackscope.dev/trends, filterable by product category.
- Browse the tech catalogue: stackscope.dev/tech, or the live stack breakdown.
- Machine access: /data covers the lookup API, the launch feed and standing watches.