Agencies have responded to growing traffic on WordPress sites by increasing their WordPress budgets this year, according to a recent survey by Pantheon, the WordPress and Drupal platform.
According to the infographic released Thursday, WordPress Moves Upmarket, 60 percent of agencies have increased WordPress budgets this year as 70 percent of agencies surveyed said the average traffic to their WordPress sites is growing.
The data is based on an online survey conducted by Pantheon online in November 2015 of 323 professional WordPress developers in its network of 2,000 agencies. Of course, it is important to keep in mind that since these agencies are affiliated with Pantheon (which provides a platform for hosting WordPress sites), and the respondents work with WordPress, they are more likely than the average developer to look at investments in WordPress in a favorable light.
But Pantheon certainly isn’t the only company banking on growing investments in WordPress; there are a number of companies that have started up in the past five years or so focused on providing hosted WordPress for agencies, designers, and other organizations, including WP Engine, Flywheel, and Pagely. Hosting companies like GoDaddy have also invested in WordPress offerings, including the launch of its pilot program for WordPress plugin creators.
Read more: Website Management Platform Pantheon Launches Enterprise Service
Agencies report that WordPress projects are displacing open source CMS (66 percent), hand-coded websites (65 percent), and proprietary CMS (43 percent). Fifty-percent of agencies surveyed by Pantheon said that the amount of WordPress projects they’ve worked on has increased over the last three years, while 39 percent said that the amount has stayed the same.
In 2016, most agencies think that the amount of WordPress projects will increase (41 percent) or stay the same (38 percent). The majority of agencies surveyed (90 percent) said the top benefit of WordPress is the ease of use for clients, though concerns remain, including security (64 percent), performance (59 percent), and clients breaking things (52 percent), three issues which often go hand-in-hand.
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