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55+ Big Name Brands That Use WordPress (2024 Edition)

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Big Name Brands That Use WordPress

People will say anything to keep their buzz going, and WordPress – just like any other human-made project – has received its fair share of bad-mouthing. People (who don’t know so much about WordPress or its potential) say all manner of things against the platform. For instance, it’s not that hard to come across comments such as:

  • WordPress is FREE, so how can it be any good for a commercial project?
  • WordPress isn’t scalable
  • WordPress isn’t secure and stuff like that

Well, I ask permission to call bullcrap on all these unfounded allegations. I mean, if WordPress wasn’t the darling we all know, why would big brands choose to run not one, not two but several of their websites (and applications) on the platform?

To put these and other WordPress myths to rest, I will mention a few (about ten) reasons why popular brands love and use WordPress. Throughout the article, I will point you to no less than 55 big brands that use WordPress just to augment my argument. See what I just did there? Augment my argument?

Reasons Why Big Brands Love and Use WordPress

So let’s get into it – here are ten reasons these big name brands love and2 use WordPress to power their websites.

1. WordPress is Easy to Use

Need I explain this? Right from the installation to the time you launch your blog/website, WordPress is coupled with ease of use. You neither need to read manuals to use WordPress nor attend special classes to become a WordPress developer or contributor. Ease, ease, and more ease is the way of WordPress.

WordPress comes with a massive collection of themes that are incredibly easy to customize. As such, you can pick a pre-made template, customize it, and have a ready website before the end of the day. If you need to add any functionality imaginable, you have a ton of easy-to-install plugins at your disposal.

Big-name brands run multiple websites, which can be an arduous task if you were to code each site from scratch. If that isn’t scary enough, managing a huge catalog of websites would drive anyone crazy without the right platform. A big brand such as WordPress.com would struggle with its massive network of blogs were it not for WordPress.

That’s right, these guys drink their own Kool-Aid. The massive WordPress.com network runs on – you guessed it – WordPress!

wordpress.com
1.WordPress.com

And if WordPress wasn’t easy to use, a big network such as WPMU DEV, which has over 900k users at the time of writing would be hell to run. Come to think of it, it wouldn’t exist, to begin with.

wpmu dev
2. WPMU DEV

Do you need more proof? Wait, you do? Don’t you use WordPress? Haha.

2. WordPress is Beautiful

Is that not right? Some of the most beautiful (and intuitive) websites out there at the moment run on WordPress. Let me show you a few examples:

big name brands that use wordpress james bond
3. James Bond 007

Don’t we all love Agent 007? James Bond has been a favorite series of mine since my childhood years, and I can’t wait for the latest installment. The big brand uses WordPress for its beautiful website. The site keeps fans around the globe up to date on the history of one of the world’s more notorious agents, behind-the-scenes features, current/upcoming promotions, and more.

big brand using WordPress the rolling stones
4. The Rolling Stones

Hello, music aficionados all over the world. Here’s one for all of you music lovers out there. The Rolling Stones brand uses a WordPress site to promote their music, festivals, merch, tours, events, current news and you have to admit – the layout and bold colors are simply stunning.

jay z is a big brand that use wordpress
5. Jay Z’s Life + Times

Here’s another for music lovers. Not to be subjective or anything, but if you’ve never heard of Jay-Z, you must live under a rock. Well, Jay Z runs his alluring website Life+Times on WordPress, where he shares what interests him including style, art, tech, sports, and – of course – music.

usain bolt world recorder holder use wordpress
6. Usain Bolt

World record holder and the greatest sprinter of all time Usain Bolt (he’s retired now) and his brand use WordPress to run his delightful website. He uses a custom “HSThree” theme to share news, appearances, and other media. To put his retirement days to good use, the legend started a foundation for kids in Jamaica. Chip in if you can 🙂

3. WordPress is Scalable

I run a couple of fairly small websites using WordPress and that’s a fact. The same cannot be said of CNN. Oh yeah, Cable News Network runs their mammoth blogs network on WordPress, and without hiccups.

CNN uses WordPress
7. CNN Blogs

I mean, can you imagine the number of page views CNN pulls in a single day? If WordPress wasn’t scalable, CNN would be in trouble. They would experience terribly slow page load speeds and website downtimes.

8. The New York Times Company

CNN is not an isolated case here, we have other big, big brands using WordPress, such as the New York Times…

university of hawaii uses wordpress and the total wordpress theme
9. University of Hawaii

…the University of Hawaii (which also happens to be powered by the Total WordPress theme)…

boise state university is a big brand that uses wordpress
10. Boise State University

…and Boise State University just to mention a few. All these big-name brands use WordPress to run high-traffic websites with millions of users. How’s that for scalability baby 🙂 That’s ‘nother myth debunked right there.

4. WordPress is Absolutely Free

This should have come first but wouldn’t that be rather obvious? WordPress is absolutely free to use or in their own words:

WordPress is an Open Source project, which means there are hundreds of people all over the world working on it. (More than most commercial platforms.) It also means you are free to use it for anything from your cat’s home page to a Fortune 500 web site without paying anyone a license fee and a number of other important freedoms.

– WordPress.org

That, plus the official WordPress repository has thousands of free WordPress themes and plenty of free WordPress plugins at this sitting. You can literally bootstrap your website, and invest in premium themes when you pick momentum.

Confession: I’m not a big brand but still use free WordPress themes even though I have bought some pretty nice premium WordPress themes over time. A good example of a premium theme I bought is the Total WordPress theme.

5. WordPress Allows You To Own Your Data

big brand use wordpress playstation blog
11. SONY PlayStation blog

Big brands such as SONY Playstation collect/generate tons of data, some of which might be sensitive. You also generate your own data, and you don’t need anybody else messing around with your bytes. But that aside, data integrity is an important thing to big brands, and the only way to ensure the integrity of data is to own everything.

microsoft is a big brand that uses wordpress
12. Microsoft News

WordPress is not just a run-of-the-mill blogging platform as many first assume (as you can read about in our history of WordPress); it’s a secure content management system that makes building amazing websites a breeze. You own your data – every single byte, and no one, even WordPress.com employees will dip a hand in your content – which is why brands like Microsoft use WordPress.

A quick tip about WordPress data security in general:

The WordPress core (the base code) gets regular updates that fix bugs and security holes, which is why we always recommend updating your WordPress site to the latest version. WordPress themes and plugins receive updates regularly as well.

There is a whole WordPress security team comprised of experts working day-in and day-out to push out security updates. Woe unto you if you don’t update your WordPress site – you’re only exposing your site to malicious attackers who are intent on stealing and destroying whatever you’ve worked so hard to build.

6. WordPress Allows You to Launch Quickly

WordPress takes care of the underlying (or structural) codebase, such that you don’t need to write code from scratch when you want to launch new applications. With your website running on WordPress, you just need a theme and plugins (or a few extra lines of code) to get any app up and running. You don’t need to spend hours on end coding new features from scratch because chances are high that there are plugins just for that.

Imagine the amount of time it would take you to create and test a new application for an HTML + CSS static website? The ability to launch quickly is the reason why big brands such as Time magazine use WordPress to create most of their web content.

time magazine big brand uses wordpress
13. Time Magazine

“Almost all of our new web content is now created on WordPress,” according to Time Magazine. But it doesn’t end there – other great examples of big brands that create new web content (and applications) using WordPress include:

techcrunch is a big name brand using wordpress
14.

TechCrunch – one of the top resources for tech, media, and nerd-culture on the web. And much more 🙂

15. Meta Newsroom

Following along the same line, Tthe Meta Newsroom is an advanced technology blog covering the latest and greatest developments in science, computing, engineering, and more from Meta. They know their stuff – and they choose WordPress.

Do you want to launch your website quickly? Then play like the big dogs – the big brands that use WordPress to deploy sites and apps in record time.

7. WordPress is Easy to Integrate With Social Media and Other Services

WordPress may be a blogging (CMS) platform, but its ability to integrate and play well with other services places it well above the fold. With the help of a few social networking plugins, you can spread your message across social media easily and quickly.

Need a fun example? The famous Angry Birds game runs its own social promotions and they’re using (you guessed it) WordPress. You will be surprised at the extent WordPress can go as far as integrating with other services go!

angry bird big brand use wordpress
16. Angry Birds

8. WordPress is 100% Responsive and Mobile Friendly

Once you place your website on WordPress, you don’t have to break your back backward trying to make it fit mobile screens. The platform is built on the latest web standards, which means you can build fully responsive websites in a matter of minutes.

Nowadays, WordPress developers create mobile-friendly and responsive themes. If your theme is not responsive, please switch to a mobile-friendly responsive theme already. Come on, we’re in the 21st century and even Google recommends responsive and mobile-friendly websites.

However, if that’s not an option (no matter how hard it’s to believe with countless responsive themes), you can always rely on a plugin to render your website on smaller (read mobile device) screens.

Let’s put WordPress responsive design to test. Fire up a new tab right now and navigate to any of the following sites from big brands that use WordPress:

17. The White House

The official news outlet for the Whitehouse, where news is announced about upcoming political events, statements from the President and helpful information about state affairs.

metro uk brand using wordpress
18. Metro UK

Metro UK is a celebrity and entertainment news magazine that also happens to have a mobile-ready WordPress site.

harvard gazette big brand using wordpress
19. Harvard Gazette

Harvard Gazette shares all the official news from Harvard and its various schools. Besides cutting-edge content, Harvard Gazette knows that WordPress is simply the best when it comes to creating a mobile-friendly and responsive blog.

Have you opened any of the above sites in a new tab? Good. Now, open the same website on your mobile device and experience WordPress responsive design at its best. WordPress = responsiveness. Alternatively, you can use the many online responsive test tools available.

9. WordPress is Dynamic, WordPress is Alive

WordPress is quite flexible and there is absolutely no limit to what you can achieve with the platform. What’s even better is the fact that WordPress is constantly being improved by a worldwide team of contributors.

With each new update, we are treated to new features and the dynamism of the platform just never stops. Looking for some inspiration? Check out the following sites:

etsy journal brand uses wordpress
20. Etsy Journal

If you are a total beginner, Etsy is a platform that helps you to sell handmade and vintage items. The brand uses WordPress to run its blog section, which shares tips, patterns, kits, and everything else you need to make your craft business successful.

21. Golf.com

Golf.com is the foremost authority on all gold news, gear and leaderboards, which is made even easier via their supercharged WordPress site.

yelp blog big brand uses wordpress
22. Yelp Blog

Yelp is a popular website that publishes crowd-sourced reviews about businesses. The company uses WordPress to run its hugely popular Yelp blog.

10. WordPress is More Than Software, it’s a Community

I will start off by quoting the 

23. Airstream

“It’s the power of the open-source community which makes WordPress as good as it is.” – Interactive One

“It feels great when we’re able to offer fixes that can help the entire community.” – BBC America

“Having all this code available and shared by the rest of the WordPress community makes it easier for us to work on the site.” – NASA

Related: Becoming a WordPress Contributor: What You Must Know

Need I say more?

Even More Big Name Brands That Use WordPress

Now that we’ve covered why big brands love WordPress and shared 23 awesome companies who choose WordPress for their websites we thought we’d keep going. Why stop now? So here are even MORE big brands that use WordPress.

24. jQuery
25. Mr Beast Burger
mozilla big brand uses wordpress
26. Mozilla Blog
27. New York Post
ted blog uses wordpress
28. Ted Blog
life time 60day use wordpress and the total wordpress theme
29. Life Time 60day (which happens to be another Total theme user)
snoop dogg big name brand uses wordpress
30. Snoop Dogg
wired
31. Wired
32. Sony Music
sylvester stallone brand uses wordpress
33. Sylvester Stallone
9to5mac brand uses wordpress
34. 9to5Mac
WGNTV chicago brand uses wordpress
35. WGN Chicago
flickr is one the big brands using wordpress
36. Flickr Blog
silverton brand loves wordpress
37. Silverton
jason mraz
38. Jason Mraz
marley coffee brand uses wordpress
39. Marley Coffee
cpanel
40. cPanel
matt mullenweg uses wordpress
41. Matt Mullenweg
42. Taylor Swift
renault group brand uses wordpress
43. Renault Group
katy perry uses wordpress
44. Katy Perry
observer
45. Observer
the city university of new york uses wordpress
46. The City University of New York
georgia state university
47. Georgia State University
university of washington
48. University of Washington
49. Vogue
felicia day brand uses wordpress
50. Felicia Day
51. VentureBeat
problogger
52. ProBlogger
tim ferris
53. Tim Ferris
disney books uses wordpress
54. Disney Books
reader's digest uses wordpress
55. Reader’s Digest
riverdance
56. Riverdance

I figured if I just provided a summary of 55 big brands that use WordPress, there wouldn’t be enough material to chew on. Now that you know why these popular brands love and use WordPress, perhaps you will be inclined to run your next web project on WordPress. If you choose this path, I promise you will never be disappointed. See you around 🙂

Article by Freddy WPExplorer.com guest author
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59 Comments

  1. AJ Clarke

    Oh and WPExplorer.com also uses WordPress 😉

    • Freddy

      WPExplorer.com is great resource for everything WordPress as well:)

  2. Wendy Tayler

    Excellent blog

    • Freddy

      Thanks for passing by and your very kind words Wendy. Come back soon for more 🙂

  3. Errol Nezar

    Good read thanks

    • Freddy

      My pleasure Errol 🙂

  4. Myke Larson

    Thanks for putting all of this together in one place. Great read! Time to install more WordPress!

    • Freddy

      WordPress is great, and it’s a lot more fun on separate installations! Thank you for passing by Myke!

  5. Lael Samuel

    This is EXACTLY the wording, and way I was looking for to pitching to my potential Client in utilizing my website service. WORDPRESS ALL THE WAY! Thanks man!

    • Freddy

      Thank you Lael! Good luck with the new client 🙂

  6. Cece

    Thanks for taking the time to put this together, Freddy! Very useful for someone looking to use WorldPress for the first time. Cheers!

    • Freddy

      Thanks for taking your time to read and share 😉

  7. soumitra

    I love ur articles, so informative and convincing… dispels all wrong notions

  8. kenprincesmith

    Truly loved this blog… This gave me many example to show-off for clients! Great Post!

  9. Barry Smoot

    Thanks for this article information. It’s great. How well can it handle large databases. Say 65,000+ real estate listings in a SQL database?

    • AJ Clarke

      How well can it handle large databases really depends more on how good your server is and how well coded your site is. Even with the smallest database a poorly coded query can cause a site to crash.

  10. Jayaram

    Good article. Few corrections,
    1) http://www.gereports.com/ General Electronic (GE) is using tumblr
    2) http://coca-cola.com/ Coca-Cola is using CQ5/AEM

    • Kyla

      Thanks for the update 🙂 It’s been a while since we posted this, so it makes sense that a few of the brands are trying out different platforms.

    • Fredrick Muriuki

      Thanks for pointing that out 🙂 The post is updated now!

  11. Dhimas Adjie Pratama

    Thanks bro, now i know what to say to my client why i use wordpress. 🙂

  12. Reginald Chan

    Nice article and write up Freedy! Good list and highly important especially when I am in the midst of doing a case study 🙂

    Cheers!

  13. Conspiracy Theory

    Dude, perfect. Thanks for this. I couldn’t have put it better, so I’ll just link to it…

  14. Conspiracy Theory

    Oh, to add to the corrections, Yahoo! is now using Tumblr too. It might be time for an update to the top 20. You do show up pretty high in the search, so a correction would be helpful.

    Thanks for the Great Stuff!

    • Kyla

      Yeah, it’s been a while 😉

  15. Kamal Afiat

    Love this article. Sometimes clients always underestimate WP. This article is to break their mindset.

  16. Faust

    WordPress, from what I see today is being pushed to its limits, I think it can possibly do anything? *giggles*

  17. Leo Amador

    This is an awesome article very informative. I found it while searching for names of big brands who use wordpress, but now after reading the comments I realized there has been some updates on the platform that are being used by the brands that you list here. What is the best and easiest way to know if WordPress is being used?

    • AJ Clarke

      You could use this site – http://www.isitwp.com/

      • Conspiracy Theory

        If I’m in a hurry, I just add /wp-admin to the url. It will show you the admin login if it’s WP.

  18. kris

    Thanks for this article, I’m thinking to build a digital download store and I was read some of article about WordPress vs drupal, honestly I like WordPress because it’s simple, and I want all of my buddy can use it easily. I’m confuse, how about for digital download store/ marketplace? Do you think wp handle it? My plan is using woocomerce and sell 1000 vector illustrations.

    • Kyla

      WordPress is used for tons for online stores, so I definitely think it’ll work. I would note that you are probably going to want some added caching though (either through your hosting solution or a third party plugin) just because of the sheer number of product images you’ll be uploading 🙂

      • Conspiracy Theory

        WordPress/WooCommerce is a great combination for e-commerce. And there are several digital download plugins. I’m using this, it’s simple and easy:

        https://wordpress.org/plugins/sell-downloads/

        You can check it out here, it’s for simple MP3 downloads, but it can be used for other digital media too:

        susansheller.com/buy-music/

        Good Luck!

    • Conspiracy Theory

      Try this link at WordPress.org for a pile of digital download plugins:

      https://wordpress.org/plugins/search.php?q=digital+downloads

  19. 61designstreet

    Great list !! And very informative post….Earlier I was a bit perplexed that which is best wordpress or drupal but after viewing this great list I’am definitely going to go for wordpress.For my website I’am already having the blog section based on wordpress which I find very easy to use but the rest is html based,now I’am definitely going to redesign whole…

  20. North

    Thanks … you convene me to use WordPress 🙂

  21. someka1514

    I love WordPress but arguments are misguiding. None of those big brands use WP for their original sites. Just for their blogs maybe. (except for those which are already blogs themselves like techcrunch, mashable etc.) Can you give me an example of a Fortune 500 company which has WP installed on their main domain? No, you can’t. I love WP and use it alot. But thats all.

    • Kyla

      Off the top of my head, I know that Ernst & Young (a massive big-four global accounting firm) is a Fortune 500 company that uses WordPress for their main website.

      But just because all big businesses aren’t using WordPress this doesn’t mean that they are avoiding WP – they’re stuck in an old way of designing for the web (kind like how my dad insists on calling me from a landline instead of a cell phone). Just give it a bit of time and I think you’ll see more and more Fortune 500s using WordPress as their design teams make the switch.

      • someka1514

        Kyla, I would be really surprised if Ernst & Young used WP for their main website. But they don’t.

        Yes big businesses don’t avoid WP, they just don’t need it. They have enough resources to build their sites with custom code. Of course this doesn’t devaluate WP but nobody would install a CMS if they have more than enough man power, money, IT teams and so on.

        (Your cell phone over line phone example is not relevant in this regard)

        • Kyla

          Oh shoot – well my bad 😛 too many windows open or something because I could’ve sworn I saw WP on one of the accounting sites I had been on. Never the less, WordPress is a huge part of the internet and definitely has breached the original “blogging platform” label. I honestly believe you’ll see bigger brands using it more often as their developers explore all the awesome things you can do with WordPress.

  22. kanishk005

    Hy freedy, You did a great job. i want some help, please tell me which wordpress theme i can use to feature my company products, Company deals with home decor and electrical appliances,
    thanks.

    • AJ Clarke

      Hi,

      This is AJ the owner here at WPExplorer – we actually sell a theme called “Total” which can be used for basically any website. It includes a page builder for adding content, many Customizer options for your general styling and a premium slider plugin. As long as you know basic WordPress you can use our theme to create virtually any site. Please check it out if you haven’t yet 😉

      • someka

        A happy “Total” user here. Highly recommended 😉

        • AJ Clarke

          Awesome! I am glad to hear that 😉

  23. Junaid

    Thanks for the article. It’s really informative

  24. alanz

    Good guide, very detailed. For a beginner in site building it may be interested to know that 99% of sites on the internet are created on CMS. It’s easy to check yourself with cms detector. So, do not worry about the fact that your blog is created for free CMS. It’s normal, no it’s good! WordPress is most popular CMS in the world!

  25. Kasper Kloster

    Yeah, when you have a blog it make sense to use WordPress. But if you want to build custom solution, I would look into some kind of framework instead.

    • Kyla

      Why? WordPress is still a great framework for any other sort of website huge companies use WordPress for their business, school, directory, etc. It’s very efficient. As long as you are a good developer you can do anything with WordPress and you can even “slim” it down if you wanted to cut out some of the bloat. I think it’s a great solution for any site it really comes down to how you develop your site.

  26. Steven Sweek

    Okay, I have read the good comments about WP. I am convinced. In fact, I have a blog site now, but I am lost because 1)I don’t know how to access my site, 2) how do I choose a background for my site, 3) how do I go about entering text (do I use Write app?), and on and on. I guess I am impatient. I would like to start blogging, but I don’t know how to even start the process. Oh, I have read the how to get started instructions, but I have already chosen a plan and, as I said, I have a site. Am I making this way too hard? Probably. Steven Sweek

    • Kyla

      Yay! I’m so glad you chose WordPress 🙂 Once you figure out the basics it’s super easy to run your blog. Here are some quick answers to your questions:

      1. To log into your website you should be able to fins a link to login in your hosting account (this is different for each host, so you’ll need to check their docs to find it) or you can go to yoururl.com/wp-admin and use the username and password you created when setting up your web hosting plan.

      2. Now that you’re logged in you can change your backgrounds. WordPress uses themes for the general website design, so you can go to Appearance > Themes to choose a free theme to install (or you can keep the default theme – it’s up to you). Once you like your theme go to Appearance > Customize and use the options in the live customizer to tweak your site design. Different themes offer different design options, but you can always use a plugin like this one to tweak colors/backgrounds on any theme.

      3. Lastly to start blogging go to Posts > Add New and get typing! You can see more instructions in our guide on how to start a blog but it’s super easy once you get going!

  27. Maryam

    Hi Kyla
    Thank you for you very informative post,personally worked as developer started from classic ASP and stucked in different versions of ASP.net am very far from open sources and CMSs,
    NOW, I’m going to run a startup, using something like a video sharing and video hosting website with all kind of tagging , full content search, profiling ,… and I really don’t want to lost myself in codes, So I need to know If I can use wordpress for that matter, is it scaleable, trustable and suitable for my purpose?

    thank you in advance

    • Kyla

      You can definitely run a video hosting/sharing website with WordPress and there are actually some ready-made video WordPress themes that have many/most of the features you’ll need. Just please don’t skimp on your hosting! Because videos use a lot of resources the most important factor will be choosing a good hosting plan that can handle your users uploading, watching and commenting. Cloud hosting would probably be a good fit since it’s affordable and super easy to scale up. I personally like Cloudways since they have an easy to use interface, but if you’re tech savvy you can go directly through a cloud host like AWS or DigitalOcean.

  28. shimran

    Thanks for sharing this piece of information with us. WordPress is best plate form for any kind of site.

  29. sean

    Wow that amazing all of these sites are done on WordPress.com.

  30. Nick

    What do you think about Gutenberg? If I did not have “Disable Gutenberg” plugin, I think it would have been tough choice to stick with WP.

    • Kyla

      Gutenberg (in my opinion) is still a work in progress, but it looks like it’s here to stay. Hopefully it’ll get better! For us it’s not a deal breaker and WordPress is still a powerful, flexible platform. And I think most brands agree 🙂

  31. دزدگیر اماکن

    wpexplorer best site everrrrrrrrrr

  32. Loudest Soul

    Nice post and write up Freedy! Great list and very important especially when I’m in the middle of the case study

  33. Anas Ibrahim

    this is cool i love wordpress

    • Kyla

      We do too! Glad you liked the post!

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