CMS Market Share
November 2020 Analysis
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 November 2020, my fourth biannual analysis of the CMS market share numbers provided by W3Techs. A lot has changed this year, in large part attributable to COVID-19. As I said in June, this has lasting effects, with WordPress, WooCommerce and Shopify’s market shares steadily on the rise.
Estimated reading time: 5 minutes
Raw CMS market share numbers
First, let’s look at the raw, most important numbers as of November 20th 2020, from this table that W3Techs maintains:
- WordPress is the #1 CMS with a 39.0% market share, 4.2% higher than November 2019.
- Shopify, which overtook Joomla as the #2 this year, has 3.1% market share, which is up 1.4% over the last 12 months.
- Joomla lost 0.5% market share in the last 12 months and is now at 2.2%.
- Drupal went from 1.7% to 1.5% over the course of the last 12 months.
- Squarespace, which was winning 12 months ago, is relatively stable at 1.4%. Wix overtook it and is now at 1.5%. Wix seems to be taking more advantage of the COVID situation than Squarespace.
- The other “winners” are Bitrix (1.0%, up 0.2%), Blogger (1.0%, up 0.2%).
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
This is the current top 10 Content Management Systems in the world by market share:
| Rank | CMS | Market share |
|---|---|---|
| #1 | WordPress | 39.0% |
| #2 | Shopify | 3.1% |
| #3 | Joomla | 2.2% |
| #4 | Drupal | 1.5% |
| #5 | Wix | 1.5% |
| #6 | Squarespace | 1.4% |
| #7 | Bitrix | 1.0% |
| #8 | Blogger | 1.0% |
| #9 | Magento | 0.7% |
| #10 | OpenCart | 0.6% |
Most of this visible (in its relativity) in the chart below. WordPress overtook “None” as the most used CMS on the planet. None of course doesn’t exist, but for people like me who watch this graph a lot it was a noteworthy moment.
Because the trends for WordPress are so much bigger than everything else, here’s a chart without WordPress:
WordPress sustains its growth
In May and June, WordPress marketshare made a big leap, growing by 1.6% in 2 months. WordPress’ growth has since stabilized, but is still quite impressive. In fact, for the longest time “None” was the big winner in W3Techs. “None” is the category of sites for which W3Techs cannot recognize the CMS. This month, WordPress overtook “None”.
Realize that WordPress’ market share grew by 4.2%, while the second CMS on the web, Shopify, has “only” 3.1% market share in total. That is simply tremendous. A large part of the growth of WordPress is driven by WooCommerce, which has grown incredibly as well.
Drupal and Joomla decline
Unlike WordPress, the other “formerly big open source CMSes” continue to decline. So much so that if they continue their current trends, Joomla and Drupal will be the #4 and #5 CMSes in the world by this time next year.
My prediction for the end of 2021 top 5 list of CMSes, based on current trends:
- WordPress – 43.5%
- Shopify – 4.6%
- Wix – 1.8%
- Joomla – 1.7%
- Drupal – 1.3%
eCommerce continues its rise
As I said in May, as a result of COVID-19, more people have been buying and selling things online. As a result, eCommerce is taking up a quickly growing portion of the top sites. Both WooCommerce and Shopify beat our May forecast. We forecasted they’d be at 6.8% in November, in reality they’re at 7.1%. Our forecast for Shopify was they’d be at 2.65%, in reality, they’re now at 3.1%. So… Our linear growth models that we show below might be a bit low estimates.
The other eCommerce players don’t seem to be doing so well. Magento saw a small dip, from 0.8% to 0.7%, OpenCart saw a minor uptick from 0.5% to 0.6%. BigCommerce doesn’t seem to grow as fast, but this might well be because they’re not easy to recognize for W3Techs.
New contenders?
In November 2019 I wrote about new contenders coming into the market, Salesforce & Mailchimp amongst other ones. None of them have materialized. They literally don’t show up in the charts anywhere yet.
Conclusion
The conclusion is simple, in the current market, there are 2 winners: WordPress (and WooCommerce “within” it) and Shopify. It’ll be interesting to see this pan out over the next 6 months!
