CMS market share, 2015 to 2026: WordPress peaked in 2022

The numbers

Every platform above 0.8% of measured sites, at four-year intervals plus the current reading. A dash means the platform was not in the source's table for that year.

What actually moved

Self-hosted platforms lost 12.7 points of share since 2015. Hosted site builders gained 12.8. That is close enough to a straight transfer that it is worth sitting with. The market did not grow a new category so much as move an existing one across a line, from software you install to software somebody else runs.

Within the self-hosted group, though, the losses are not evenly spread, and this is where the common story goes wrong.

WordPress did not lose to the builders. Joomla and Drupal did

Joomla went from 8.6% to 1.7%. Drupal went from 5.1% to 1%. Both lost about four fifths of their share, and both were falling steadily through the years when WordPress was still climbing.

WordPress spent that period taking share, not losing it: 60.7% in 2015 up to 65.2% by 2022. It consolidated the self-hosted market first, and only then began to give ground. Its 59% today is its lowest reading since 2017, which is a real decline, and it is also still more than three times the entire hosted-builder category combined.

Both things are true at once, and most coverage picks one. If you want to argue WordPress is finished, the last four readings support you. If you want to argue it dominates, the absolute number supports you. The honest version is that it is a declining incumbent with an enormous lead.

Webflow has not moved in three readings

This one is worth naming plainly because we sell migrations off Webflow and the number does not flatter that business. Webflow entered the table in 2019 at 0.2% and reached 1.2%. It has now recorded the same figure in three consecutive readings.

For a platform that occupies as much space in design conversation as Webflow does, sitting at 1.2% of measured sites is a smaller footprint than its reputation suggests. Tilda, which is barely discussed in English-language design circles, is at exactly the same 1.2%. Duda is at 1.1%. The share is far more spread across small builders than the discourse implies.

Two honest readings of a flat line: the platform has found its ceiling in this measure, or the measure is missing where its growth is happening. Webflow skews toward newer, design-led and often smaller sites, and the source samples the top ten million. Both can be true. We are not going to pretend the data resolves it.

Shopify is the outlier

Shopify went from 0.7% to 7.7%, and it is the only platform here that grew by more than a factor of ten while already being large. It also has the one visible setback in the table, falling from 6.6% to 5.7% between 2022 and 2023, which lines up with the end of the pandemic ecommerce surge. It has grown every year since.

One year in this series behaves oddly, and we are not going to hide it

Between the 2018 and 2019 readings, several platforms move by noticeably more than they do in the years either side. Squarespace gains 1.1 points, against 0.4 the year before and 0.1 the year after. Wix gains 0.9 against 0.3 and 0.5. In the other direction, Drupal loses 1.1 against 0.2 and 0.5, and Joomla loses 1.1 against 0.7 and 0.8.

2019 is also the first year Webflow and Tilda appear in the table at all. A year in which new platforms become visible, hosted builders jump, and self-hosted platforms drop harder than usual is more consistent with a change in what the survey can detect than with a single unusual year in the market.

We cannot prove that from the outside, so we are not asserting it. What we will say is that if you use this series, treat 2019 as a possible discontinuity and prefer comparisons that do not straddle it. The 2022 peak and the decline since sit entirely on one side of that line, which is part of why we lead with them.

How to actually use a market-share number

Three uses this data is good for, and one it is routinely misused for.

It is good for hiring and continuity risk. A platform at 1.0% and falling has a shrinking pool of people who can maintain what you built. Drupal at 1% is a different staffing proposition than Drupal at 5.1%, regardless of the software's quality, which has not declined by four fifths.

It is good for reading vendor claims. When a platform describes itself as the fastest growing, this is where you check the shape of that claim. Growth from a small base looks dramatic in percentage terms and modest in points, and both framings appear in the same table above.

It is good for timing a conversation, not making a decision. An incumbent that has declined for four consecutive readings is a reasonable prompt to review your own position. It is not a reason to move.

The misuse is treating it as a quality signal. Share measures adoption, and adoption follows distribution, price, marketing and switching cost at least as much as it follows engineering. Nothing in this table tells you whether a platform is well built.

The question this data does not answer

Every figure here counts sites that exist. Nobody publishes what share of new builds each platform wins, which is the number that would actually tell you where the market is going rather than where it has been. The gap is not an oversight, it is hard: you would need a defensible way to identify newly launched sites at scale and re-run it on a fixed cadence.

We flag it because it is the honest limit of this article. A twelve-year series of existing sites is a genuinely useful thing to have and it is a lagging picture by construction. Anyone telling you what the market will do next is not getting it from here.

What this cannot tell you

Identification is by detectable signature, so sites that hide or strip their CMS fingerprint are absent. Share of existing sites is not share of new builds, and the top 10 million skews toward established sites.

The trap worth naming: share of existing sites is not share of new builds. A platform that every new project chose from tomorrow would still take years to show up here, because the denominator is full of sites built long ago that nobody has touched. Decline in this table is a lagging indicator, and so is growth.

It also says nothing about whether any of these platforms is right for you. A 59% share is not an argument for WordPress and a 1.2% share is not an argument against Webflow. Those decisions turn on your content model, your team, your integrations and what you are willing to run, and none of that is in a percentage.

Method and source

Data from Market share yearly trends for content management systems by W3Techs, read on 2026-08-15. Share of the top 10 million websites, among sites whose content management system is identified. Surveyed by W3Techs; readings are taken 1 January of each year, plus a current reading.

We parsed the source's table cells rather than its page text, because the flattened text loses the empty cells and our first pass silently placed two platforms in the wrong decade because of it. Two rows the source shows from 2023 with no earlier history are excluded here: a series that begins mid-way at a high value is far more likely a reclassification than real adoption, and we would rather drop it than narrate a taxonomy change as a market movement.

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