Happy 20th Anniversary, WordPress!

The world’s most beloved CMS turns 20 this week, marking two decades of content creation, innovation, and community contributions. 

What started as a small open source project now dominates the web, with more than 43% of all websites (and 63% of sites built with a CMS) using WordPress as their underlying framework.

Since 2010, WP Engine has remained committed to the WordPress community, optimizing our platform and maintaining a robust suite of open source tools that assists builders and marketers, agencies and solopreneurs, global brands and small businesses, and everyone in between. 

In celebration of this important milestone for WordPress and the community, our team has been working on a fun project that looks back at some of the changes—to both WordPress and the world—that have taken place over the past two decades.

A Brief History of WordPress and the World

WordPress has come a long way since version 1.0, and each new iteration of the CMS has included improvements that help its users create more pleasing, more personalized, more performant digital experiences.

To celebrate the 20th anniversary of WordPress, we built a site that mirrors the look and feel of version 1.0 to remind you just how far we’ve come as a community.

Scroll through for a quick timeline of major WordPress version updates, the changes they brought, and what was going on in the world at that moment in time. From sports, memes, and celebrities to breaking news and new technology, we visit some of the cultural touchstones that took place around each major WordPress version release.

We hope you get a good chuckle out of the decades-old design elements and take some time to appreciate how much WordPress—and the world—has changed in a relatively short time frame.

WP Engine Celebrates 13 Amazing Years

Coinciding with the 20th anniversary of WordPress is the 13th anniversary of WP Engine’s founding! Since 2010, WP Engine has evolved alongside WordPress at every stage, refining our platform and offerings to best serve the needs of the community.

Our WordPress anniversary site also includes some behind the scenes images that show what it was like to work at WP Engine in those early days. Things have changed a lot since 2010, both for WordPress and for WP Engine, and we’re honored to have earned the trust of the WordPress community as we look toward the future of our platform.

We can’t wait to see what the next 13 years will bring for WP Engine, our customers, and WordPress as a whole!

Thank You, WordPress Community

Without the community, WordPress wouldn’t be the thriving digital framework we know and love today. Thank you to all the community members who have contributed to WordPress versions throughout the years. We hope you enjoy our small homage to the history of WordPress!