Highlights of web technology surveys, June 2010: The amazing dominance of WordPress as CMS

Posted by Matthias Gelbmann on 1 June 2010 in News, Content Management, WordPress

For our surveys, we use a very broad definition of "content management system". For us, a CMS is any web-based applications for creating and managing the content of a website. We include all such systems in this category, also systems that are often classified as wikis, blog engines or discussion boards. We do not include HTML editors and other off-line systems. Using that definition, the discussion whether WordPress is really a full-fledged CMS or merely a blogging system does not apply.

The astonishing result of the overall CMS survey is, that 56% of the sites that use a content management system are using WordPress, and that percentage is even growing.

When people look at our statistics, they often say: "yes, this is certainly because of all the free blogs at WordPress.com". But this is not the case. In all our surveys we do not count subdomains as separate domains. Therefore WordPress.com only counts as one site, no matter how many blogs they host as myblog.wordpress.com.

There must be many different reasons why people decide to use WordPress. Although WordPress is open source software, price cannot be a decisive reason, because many of the main competitors are also free. Looking at the technology change report gives us some hints. In this report, we see which systems people used before switching to WordPress, and which systems they convert to when they stop using it.

We see that the main movement is from Blogger to WordPress. That is quite understandable. People start blogging with a blogger account, and when they become more popular or when they want more flexibility, they switch to WordPress. Hardly anyone makes the switch from WordPress to Blogger.

Following that logic, one could expect that once people outgrow WordPress, they switch to more complex systems. Surprisingly, the opposite is the case. More people are switching to WordPress from systems that are often considered more feature-rich or more flexible (e.g. Joomla, Drupal, Typo3) than the other way around.

The opinion that other systems are more complex is somehow confirmed by the breakdown of CMS  by ranking. More popular sites tend to be more complex, and the WordPress market share in the top 10.000 is "only" 40% (still market leader).

My conclusion is: For most people WordPress offers the best balance of features and easy-of-use.

Looking at one last statistics gives interesting insights into the diversity of the CMS market: Usage of CMS broken down by content language - the variations could hardly be larger: whereas sites in Swedish use WordPress almost exclusively (94.7%), the share of sites in Arabic is below 10%. The only other language in our surveys where WordPress is not leading, is Polish. Polish sites prefer Joomla by a small margin. German webmasters like Typo3 and Chinese like Discuz, but those are still behind WordPress.

The CMS landscape is changing fast, and also WordPress is only 7 years old. It will be difficult to maintain that market share for very long. Any guess how future systems will look like?

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Please note, that all trends and figures mentioned in that article are valid at the time of writing. Our surveys are updated frequently, and these trends and figures are likely to change over time.

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