Website Builder Statistics: CMS Market Share Data

WordPress runs 40.2% of all websites and 58.7% of websites that use a content management system, according to W3Techs data dated 26 September 2026. That share is falling: WordPress held 43.2% of all websites in December 2025, so it has lost 3.0 percentage points in nine months while Wix, Shopify, Squarespace and Webflow have each gained ground.

What share of the market does each CMS and website builder hold?

W3Techs measures the technology behind a large, continuously-recrawled sample of live websites. Its snapshot dated 26 September 2026 gives two figures for each platform: its share of all websites, and its share of the smaller pool of websites that use any CMS.

Platform	Share of all websites	Share of CMS-using websites
WordPress	40.2%	58.7%
Shopify	5.4%	7.8%
Wix	4.2%	6.2%
Squarespace	2.4%	3.6%
Joomla	1.1%	1.6%
Tilda	0.8%	1.2%
Webflow	0.8%	1.2%
Duda	0.7%	1.1%
Drupal	0.6%	0.9%

Source: W3Techs, CMS usage statistics, data dated 26 September 2026.

Across all websites, 68.5% use some form of CMS and 31.5% have none detectable, per the same W3Techs snapshot. A separate methodology from the HTTP Archive’s 2025 Web Almanac, which crawls a different sample of pages and classifies CMS by rendered markup rather than by public technology signatures, found CMS adoption of 54% on mobile and 55% on desktop for 2025, up from 43% and 42% respectively in 2021. The two figures are not directly comparable because they measure different populations and use different detection methods, but both point the same direction: CMS-driven sites make up a growing share of the pages each survey crawls.

Is WordPress’s market share falling?

W3Techs data, cited in Search Engine Journal’s coverage of the trend, shows WordPress’s share of all websites falling every month from December 2025 to May 2026:

Month	WordPress share of all websites
December 2025	43.2%
January 2026	43.0%
February 2026	42.8%
March 2026	42.7%
April 2026	42.5%
27 May 2026	41.9%
26 September 2026	40.2%

That is a 3.0 percentage point drop from December 2025 to September 2026, with 1.7 of those points lost since the end of May alone. Over the twelve months to 27 May 2026, W3Techs recorded corresponding gains for Wix (+0.6 percentage points), Shopify (+0.4), Squarespace (+0.2) and Webflow (+0.1), none of which fully offset WordPress’s loss on its own.

Source: W3Techs CMS usage history, cited via Search Engine Journal, “WordPress Market Share Declines For Six Months In A Row”, read 26 September 2026.

How does CMS usage vary by site popularity?

The HTTP Archive’s 2024 Web Almanac CMS chapter, published November 2024 from a June 2024 crawl, found CMS adoption is far lower among the most popular sites than across the web as a whole:

Site rank (by traffic)	Desktop	Mobile
Top 1,000	7%	8%
Top 10,000	16%	17%
Top 100,000	21%	21%
Top 1,000,000	28%	27%
Top 10,000,000	45%	45%
All sites	49%	49%

Detected CMS adoption climbs steadily as the sample widens from the most popular sites to the whole web. Part of this gap is likely genuine (larger sites more often use custom or headless builds), but the Almanac’s own detection method can also miss or misclassify a CMS on a heavily customised site, so the low figures for top-ranked sites should not be read as a precise count of custom builds. This data is from the 2024 chapter (data collected June 2024); it is the most recent Web Almanac edition to publish this specific rank breakdown, so treat it as a 2024 baseline rather than a current figure.

Source: HTTP Archive Web Almanac 2024, CMS chapter, published 11 November 2024.

Which platforms pass Core Web Vitals most often?

The HTTP Archive’s 2024 Web Almanac CMS chapter measured the share of mobile pages on each platform meeting Google’s “good” threshold across all three Core Web Vitals at once, comparing 2023 against 2024:

Platform	2023 pass rate	2024 pass rate
Duda	62%	73%
TYPO3 CMS	63%	71%
Squarespace	33%	60%
Wix	40%	57%
Drupal	46%	56%
Weebly	40%	49%
1C-Bitrix	30%	45%
Joomla	37%	45%
WordPress	28%	40%
Tilda	28%	39%

The following year’s chapter, covering 2025, named five platforms explicitly in its own year-on-year comparison: Duda reached 85%, TYPO3 CMS 79%, and Wix jumped to 74%. That same chapter states Wix’s own 2024 baseline as 55%, which does not match the 57% the 2024 chapter published for Wix’s 2024 figure; the two editions simply differ on this point and we have not been able to establish why. Weebly was the only platform in the 2025 comparison to decline, to 47%, and the chapter describes WordPress as “among the lowest-ranked” platforms, at 45%. Squarespace, Drupal, Joomla, 1C-Bitrix and Tilda were not given individual 2025 figures in the chapter’s own prose.

In the 2023-to-2024 table, Tilda and WordPress tied for the lowest 2023 pass rate at 28%; by 2024 WordPress had moved to 40% while Tilda was just behind at 39%. Squarespace had the largest single-year gain in that 2023-to-2024 table, up 27 percentage points. Separately, Wix’s 2024-to-2025 gain, taken entirely from the 2025 chapter’s own figures, was +19 percentage points, the largest gain confirmed within that chapter’s own year-on-year comparison.

Source: HTTP Archive Web Almanac 2024, CMS chapter, published 11 November 2024 (2023/2024 table), and HTTP Archive Web Almanac 2025, CMS chapter, published 15 January 2026 (2025 figures).

Platform-wide pass rates describe averages across many sites on shared infrastructure and templates; an individual site’s own Core Web Vitals depend on its specific theme, plugins and hosting, not the platform average alone.

How many users and merchants do the major platforms report?

Company disclosures use different metrics and reporting cadences, so the figures below are not directly comparable to each other or to the market-share percentages above.

Shopify stopped disclosing an exact total merchant count after 2021, when its annual filing reported approximately 2.06 million merchants. Since then it has reported Gross Merchandise Volume and Monthly Recurring Revenue instead: its 10-Q for the quarter ended 30 June 2026 reported GMV up 32% year on year to $116 billion, without stating a merchant count. Shopify’s own investor materials describe the platform as used by millions of merchants in more than 175 countries.

Squarespace reported over 5.2 million total unique subscriptions for the quarter ended 30 June 2024, up 21% from 4.3 million a year earlier. Squarespace was taken private in October 2024 and has not filed public quarterly results since, so this is the last publicly disclosed figure.

Wix reported 304.2 million total registered users as of 31 December 2025, up from 282.4 million a year earlier (+8%), in its Form 20-F annual filing for fiscal year 2025.

Sources: Shopify 2021 annual filing (merchant count), Shopify 10-Q, quarter ended 30 June 2026 (GMV) and Shopify investor materials (“millions of merchants” wording); Squarespace 8-K, exhibit 99.1, 2 August 2024; Wix Form 20-F, fiscal year 2025.

What SEO features does each platform’s own documentation confirm?

These facts come only from each platform’s own help and developer documentation, not third-party guides, so they describe what is supported rather than how well it works in practice.

• Shopify publishes a default robots.txt for every store and lets merchants add custom rules, such as blocking specific crawlers or adding extra sitemap URLs, by creating a robots.txt.liquid template. Shopify’s own documentation labels this an unsupported customisation that its support team will not troubleshoot.
• Wix sets a default canonical URL on every page automatically and lets site owners override it per page, for both regular pages and product pages, through the site’s SEO panel.
• Squarespace’s native URL Mappings tool creates 301 or 302 redirects and evaluates them top-down, so the first matching rule wins; a mapped URL will not redirect its trailing-slash variant unless that variant is mapped separately. Its Code Injection feature adds custom code to the site-wide or per-page <head>.
• Webflow’s native redirect manager accepts one-to-one old-path to new-path mappings, recommends a maximum of 1,000 redirects, and runs them in the order they were added. Site-wide settings expose a global sitemap, robots.txt and canonical tag, and page settings expose each page’s title tag, meta description, Open Graph tags and slug.

Sources: Shopify Help Center, editing robots.txt; Wix Help Center, canonical tags; Squarespace Help Center, URL mappings and code injection; Webflow Help Center, custom code and Webflow University, redirects.

Feature availability is not the same as ranking performance. Choosing a platform for SEO depends on how those features work in combination with your content and technical setup; see our comparison of the best website builder for SEO for how the major platforms perform against each other on that basis specifically.

Method

Most figures above are sourced directly from the named publisher: W3Techs’ own usage-statistics pages, the HTTP Archive’s published Web Almanac CMS chapters, each company’s SEC filing, or the named platform’s own help or developer documentation. The exception is WordPress’s monthly market-share series and the competitor point-gains in the “Is WordPress’s market share falling?” section, which we could not locate on W3Techs’ own historical pages and have instead taken from Search Engine Journal’s reporting of the W3Techs data, as stated at that section’s source line. Percentage-point changes are calculated in a checked script (data/compute.py) from the exact source figures; the calculations and every underlying figure are included in the CSV download below. No figure has been extrapolated beyond the period or population its source actually measured.

Limitations

Market-share detection methods differ between W3Techs (technology-signature scanning of a large domain sample) and the HTTP Archive Web Almanac (rendered-markup classification of a different, HTTP-Archive-specific crawl sample). Their percentages should not be added together or treated as measuring the same population.

Core Web Vitals pass rates are platform-wide averages, not a guarantee for any individual site.

The 2024 and 2025 Web Almanac editions give slightly different figures for the same prior year in places. For example, Wix’s 2024 Core Web Vitals pass rate is stated as 57% in the 2024 chapter and 55% in the 2025 chapter’s own retrospective chart. We could not establish why the two editions differ, so we cite each figure to its own edition rather than forcing a single number.

We found no primary, verifiable source publishing a UK-specific breakdown of CMS or website-builder market share at the time of research (26 September 2026). W3Techs and the Web Almanac both report worldwide figures only, and country-level estimates circulating from other sources could not be traced back to a named, checkable primary source.

Company-reported user and merchant figures use each company’s own definitions and are not independently audited third-party data.

How to cite this page

OptimisedWebsite, “Website Builder Statistics: CMS Market Share Data,” updated 26 September 2026, https://optimisedwebsite.com/learn/website-builder-statistics/. Data drawn from W3Techs, the HTTP Archive Web Almanac, and SEC filings as cited above.

Download the full dataset as a CSV.

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