State of the CMS: It’s good to be the king

Each and every day it seems as though a new content management system comes out of the woodwork, promising to make the creation, editing, and management of website content easier. But even with all these players, there is a clear King of the CMS.

Unrest in the CMS kingdom

As we mentioned in our first “State of the CMS” post, the concept of what a content management system is may be shifting.

For years a CMS was a standalone, self-hosted product, but market developments in recent years show that self-hosted products may be on their way out. Many developers have been shifting CMS development to support a hosted, SaaS-driven model.

Who was the initiator? Automattic, the development team behind the current King of the CMS in terms of market share: WordPress.

The numbers don’t lie

Thanks to a W3Techs CMS market share report, we know that WordPress commands 60.7%* of the total CMS market. That means that out of all the websites on the internet running on a content management system, just over 60% of them run on WordPress.

What is even more impressive is that 23.4%* of all websites on the internet use WordPress, with the closest runner up, Joomla, behind with 2.9%*. That is a staggering gap!

But what about the rest of the pack?

1. WordPress (60.7%)
2. Joomla (7.5%)
3. Drupal (5.1%)
4. Blogger (2.9%)
5. Magento (2.8%)
6. TYPO3 (1.6%)
7. PrestaShop (1.3%)
8. Bitrix (1.1%)
9. vBulletin (1.0%)
10. OpenCart (0.9%)

What does this mean?

The data suggests that the top players (mostly WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal) may control the CMS market. But the fact of the matter is that if you look at the numbers from the past three to four years, the shift seems to be benefitting some of the SaaS based CMS’ like PresaShop, and Squarespace.

We’ll cover some of these SaaS based alternatives to WordPress in an upcoming feature, comparing them to self-hosted options in terms of performance, and functionality flexibility.

In the meantime, if you liked what you read here, please let us know in the comments below or by tweeting @UptrendsMonitor!