WordPress powers three in 10 sites on the web, W3Techs finds

James has a passion for how technologies influence business and has several Mobile World Congress events under his belt. James has interviewed a variety of leading figures in his career, from former Mafia boss Michael Franzese, to Steve Wozniak, and Jean Michel Jarre. James can be found tweeting at @James_T_Bourne.


WordPress now powers 30% of all sites on the web, according to the latest figures from web survey provider W3Techs.

According to the most recent numbers, for the end of February 2018, WordPress is at 30.0% for absolute percentage of websites, giving it a 60.2% market share for all content management systems. It’s worth noting that just over half (50.2%) of sites analysed by W3Techs do not use a CMS monitored by the company, or are built from scratch. The figures arrive from analysis of the top 10 million websites according to Alexa rankings.

Joomla, at 6.3% market share, powers just over 3% of sites, followed by Drupal at 4.4% and 2.2%, and Magento at 2.4% and 1.2% respectively. All in all, more than 50 CMS systems were analysed that powered at least 0.1% of all sites – in other words, 10,000 websites use it – while a further 300 vendors were named which between them had a market share of less than 0.1%.

The W3Techs figures also account for a variety of other metrics, including server-side programming languages and JavaScript libraries. For the former, PHP naturally remains on top with 83.2% usage, well ahead of ASP.NET (13.9%) and still gaining, while for the latter Polyfill.io, Bootstrap and React are the fastest growers.

React’s placing as a JavaScript library growing in influence will be of little surprise to regular readers of this publication. In January, a report from technical recruiter HackerRank, which polled almost 40,000 developers, argued React was a ‘big opportunity’ for developers as a marketable skill that companies needed today.

As far back as 2014 – although the trends were much earlier – this publication mused upon the trend of WordPress becoming a CMS behemoth. A report from 34SP – a WordPress-based hosting provider, mind – found more and more small businesses were getting comfortable with the platform, thereby “finally blowing away its image as just a blogging platform.”

You can see the full list of content management stats here.

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