Entire Internet CMS Usage January-July 2015
⏰ Old Post
This post is over 8 years old - it might be slightly outdated and consigned to the history books.
328,852,063 Domains were indexed this quarter. In the past we've shown the increase in usage by numbers, this is interesting but doesn't show much of a change. WordPress has been found on an additional 1.1 million domains since January but only accounts for a 7% increase in customer base. Where as Ghost was added to 2,184 domain home pages and accounts for a 17% increase in their customer base.
Freemium offerings like Squarespace and Wix also increased their customer base by around 150k new websites but with a 33% increase in usage of Squarespace and a 14% increase in Wix as their initial custom bases are very different.
CMS Market Share Increases by Install Base
More and more websites appear to be using a known CMS (rather than being custom built from the ground up) - this makes total sense now, the existing tools have matured so much and with a huge market of supported extensions and plugins that look after things like design, SEO, caching it doesn't make sense not to use one.
WordPress is a clear CMS leader, 48% of all sites that we detect that are using a known CMS system are using WordPress (so almost 1 in 2 CMS powered sites).
WordPress Versions
Version changes for tools like WordPress show massive swings as you would expect, 1.1 million sites dropped WordPress 4.0 whilst 3.4 million sites added version 4.2.
1748 websites are still using (or at least pretending to use) WordPress 2.1 which was released 8 years ago, down 259 sites since January.
CMS Losers
There was no significant losers in CMS - some of the biggest ones are from the biggest companies such as GoDadday, Yahoo and 1&1 - however this may be a change in how their parked domains are perceived. Most of the losing CMS systems already have a small user base already and are CMS systems that have not been updated for months or years. Pligg CMS dropped its user base by 14% but has not seen a blog post since August 2014 for example.
Where are CMS systems heading?
WordPress continues to accelerate in growth whilst freemium competitors like Wix and Squarespace can now afford to have Heidi Klum and The Dude in their advertisements.
Wix and Squarespace's main acquisition for existing websites that are using a CMS are from WordPress sites, however Automattic, the company behind WordPress, also have a premium version of their product at Wordpress.com - just no known advertisement with celebrities in it yet.
