Content Management Systems : State of the Nation 2014

Content is king, SEO is dead and the world is going WordPress crazy. Or so the pundits says, but what are the actual numbers behind this?

The first shocker is that almost two thirds of websites use NO content management system(CMS). Wow! That’s a lot of hand-built legacy sites that are going to need re-building in the next year or two.

Of the one third that do use a CMS, then WordPress does indeed dominate – maybe the best word to use is obliterate as the ONLY CMS systems with more than 2% marketshare are:

  • WordPress 60.0%
  • Joomla 9.0%
  • Drupal 5.5%
  • Blogger 3.3%
  • Magento 2.7%

Data from W3Techs.com

This suggests that WordPress runs about one fifth of the web sites in the world which fits with other data we’ve seen. What is more interesting is the rate of change, WordPress is up about 1.5% since October ’13 whilst Joomla and Drupal are collectively down by 5%.

Joomla had a sliver of a chance back in 2011, but the infamous. Version 8 is still yet to ship, despite work starting almost 3 years ago. In the same time frame WordPress has shipped 7 major iterations (3.2 to 3.8). The jury is still out on whether Joomla will survive the year.

WordPress seems to have won the war of CMS without even breaking a sweat. We just need to convince the rest of the old-fashioned hand-built web world to move to WordPress. Spread the word please.

So who’s going to compete with WordPress? Fork anyone? (open source bad joke)