CMS Market Share
Analysis December 2021
Every 6 months I analyze the CMS market share numbers provided by W3Techs in depth. I look at the top 10 CMSes, which content management systems have grown, which have shrunk. I always pay special attention to eCommerce platforms as well.
I do these analyses biannually. The latest one can always be found here: CMS market share analysis.
This is the CMS market share analysis for December 2021, my sixth biannual analysis of the CMS market share numbers provided by W3Techs. While in the previous two analyses the ecosystem changed a lot already, we have some interesting new trends in the last 6 months.
Estimated reading time: 6 minutes
Raw CMS market share numbers
First, let’s look at the raw, most important numbers as of June 10th 2021, from this table that W3Techs maintains:
- WordPress is the #1 CMS with a 43% market share, 1.5% higher than in June 2021.
- Shopify, which overtook Joomla as the #2 in 2020, has 4.3% market share, which is up 1% over the last 12 months.
- Joomla lost 0.3% market share in the last 6 months and is now at 1.8% dropping from #3 to #5 in just 6 months time.
- Wix is growing fast, adding 0.3% marketshare in just 6 months, overtaking Squarespace in the rankings again and getting to the third spot.
- Squarespace is growing in a stable way, now at 1.8% and the fourth spot.
- Drupal dropped to 1.3%, loosing 0.2% over the course of the last 6 months and has tumbled to the 6th spot in the rankings. Just a year ago, Drupal was #4.
- Bitrix (0.9%), Magento (0.6%) and OpenCart (0.6%) are loosing a bit, Blogger saw a minor “up” and is now at 1.0%, in the 7th spot.
Notes about these numbers
The W3Techs research I’m analyzing in this post is based on the top 10 million sites on the web as provided by Alexa and the 1 million list provided by Tranco, see their notes on technologies. While some platforms like Tumblr and WordPress.com are huge, they won’t show up as high in these rankings because the individual subdomains are not considered separate websites by W3Techs.
The top 10 CMSes December 2021
This is the current top 10 Content Management Systems in the world by market share:
| Rank | CMS | Market share |
|---|---|---|
| #1 | WordPress | 43.0% |
| #2 | Shopify | 4.3% |
| #3 | Wix | 1.9% |
| #4 | Squarespace | 1.8% |
| #5 | Joomla | 1.8% |
| #6 | Drupal | 1.3% |
| #7 | Blogger | 1.0% |
| #8 | Bitrix | 0.9% |
| #9 | Magento | 0.6% |
| #10 | OpenCart | 0.6% |
Most of this visible (in its relativity) in the chart below. “None” means the CMS wasn’t detected or is “custom”:
Because the trends for WordPress are so much bigger than everything else, here’s a chart without WordPress:
WordPress’ growth slows down, while Shopify and Wix win
For a large part of the pandemic, WordPress saw tremendous growth in these numbers, often adding 0.3% to 0.4% market share month over month for many months in a row. This trend seems to be shifting, with WordPress “only” adding an average of 0.2% every month in the last 6 months. This is still tremendous growth, but it does mean that it’s not heading towards 50% market share as I would have expected based on the numbers a year ago.
Shopify continues to show amazing growth, in some months in the last 6 months it even managed to match the growth of WordPress in absolute numbers. Similarly, Wix has stepped up the pace and is growing rapidly.
Drupal and Joomla decline
Unlike WordPress, the other “formerly big open source CMSes” continue to decline. Unfortunately my prediction for the end of 2021 in terms of marketshare for Joomla and Drupal were spot on in terms of percentages. In terms of ranking it’s even worse than expected with Joomla and Drupal dropping to spot 5 and 6 in the rankings.
If these trends continue, they’ll be at 1.4% for Joomla and 1.2% for Drupal next year. They won’t actually change position though as everyone else in the top 10 is declining.
New contenders: all SaaS
Webflow and Weebly have both shown nice growth over the past 12 months. Webflow especially can be expected to be knocking on the door of the top 10 by this time next year. As an open source enthusiast, it pains me to see that all the SaaS tools are winning, and open source in general is losing everywhere.
Overall market consolidation
The entire CMS market is consolidating, and doing so fairly quickly. In June 2020, the top 50 CMSes combined were responsible for 54.8% of sites followed by W3Techs. Right now in December 2021 this is 63.8% of sites. We forecast that a year from now this will be over 70%.
Based on the current numbers, this is the current CMS market share pie chart:
Based on our current forecast models, we think this is what the market will look like in 2022:
eCommerce continues its rise
As a result of COVID-19, more people have been buying and selling things online. As a result, eCommerce is becoming more important and eCommerce sites take up a bigger portion of the top 10 million sites. I honestly don’t know where all these eCommerce sites are coming from.
Just like WordPress though, WooCommerce’s growth seems to be slowing a bit. Over the last 6 months, WooCommerce added 0.4% market share while Shopify added 0.6%. It’s a bit too early to draw conclusions over this, so let’s see where this goes 6 months from now.
The other eCommerce players don’t seem to be doing so well. Magento is stable at 0.6%, OpenCart dipped back to 0.6% too.
Conclusion
The last few analyses I did, it was simple: WordPress was the clear winner. And don’t get me wrong: WordPress is still the 800-pound gorilla in the room, with WooCommerce underneath / inside it still growing too. But the three commercial SaaS providers Shopify, Wix and Squarespace are all growing and seem to be picking up pace. As those companies get more and more access to cash, as they’re generating more and more revenue, it’s going to be very interesting to see what that means. We’ll see whether that trend continues over the coming months and years.
