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View Full Version : 48% of all CMS websites are WordPress, and other stats



Harold Mansfield
07-15-2015, 06:32 PM
According to builtWith.com WordPress makes up 48% of all websites online who use a CMS, a 7% (+1,149,956 domains) increase in usage.
Even more interesting Squarespace (+151,867) , Wix (+154,783) and Ghost are also seeing a market share increase.

Overall, a crap load of people are building new websites over all. 328,852,063 Domains were indexed online this quarter.
More here: Entire Internet CMS Usage January-July 2015 | BuiltWith Blog (http://blog.builtwith.com/2015/07/06/entire-internet-cms-usage-january-july-2015/)

Owen
07-15-2015, 06:37 PM
Well, it's official everybody. Wordpress has won the CMS war. I doubt there's gonna be another script that beats Wordpress unless something drastic happens.

Harold Mansfield
07-15-2015, 06:43 PM
Well, it's official everybody. Wordpress has won the CMS war. I doubt there's gonna be another script that beats Wordpress unless something drastic happens.
I'd love to applaud that, but things change quickly. The cheap do it yourself CMS market is coming on strong. The tools are better, and they're easier to use.
Site builders like Go Daddy and others are taking a hit. But you can't discount the big ad push that Squarespace and Wix are doing right now.

I think when the dust settles WP will continue to be what "Professionals" use, and people who need more control and function than what pre-packaged solutions offer, but for the new start up, Mom and Pop who just need a 2-3 page presence with a couple of images and a contact form...people like me have pretty much lost that market.

Brian Altenhofel
07-15-2015, 07:28 PM
If you look at Top 10K vs 100K vs 1M, you'll notice that Drupal takes a bigger chunk (14.38%, 9.79%, 5.62% respectively) the higher up in tier you go. But that's because we build things like Whitehouse.gov and Weather.com.

Of course, one can argue that Drupal is wrongly classified there since it's not a CMS, but rather a framework used to build a CMS.

Harold Mansfield
07-15-2015, 07:44 PM
If you look at Top 10K vs 100K vs 1M, you'll notice that Drupal takes a bigger chunk (14.38%, 9.79%, 5.62% respectively) the higher up in tier you go. But that's because we build things like Whitehouse.gov and Weather.com.

Of course, one can argue that Drupal is wrongly classified there since it's not a CMS, but rather a framework used to build a CMS.
.
The stats are overall CMS usage, worldwide. If Drupal isn't a CMS then you can't say it has a bigger market share of CMS's, right?

Here are the Drupal usage stats according to the same website:
Drupal Usage Statistics (http://trends.builtwith.com/cms/Drupal)

Brian Altenhofel
07-15-2015, 07:54 PM
And WordPress builds sites like GM, Speaker of the House and Nike. We're not whipping them out here, just sharing some WordPress stats in the WordPress section.

GM and Nike are Adobe CQ. Speaker.gov is Drupal (as are almost all of the the House and Senate sites).

I'm just noting that WP and everyone else shrinks as you get into higher tiers.

Harold Mansfield
07-15-2015, 08:02 PM
GM and Nike have a custom system. Speaker.gov is Drupal (as are almost all of the the House and Senate sites).

I'm just noting that WP and everyone else shrinks as you get into higher tiers.
I don't think anyone ever suggested that complex sites are run on stock WordPress.
No one is trying to take anything away from Drupal, but WordPress holds it's own in the Corporate and Government websites.

For instance, The Library of Congress website is on WordPress.

You can actually see which departments and government websites use what.
Content Management Systems Used by Government Agencies | DigitalGov
(http://www.digitalgov.gov/resources/content-management-systems-used-by-government-agencies/)

The U.S. Government (GSA) lists tools to use for it's various departments as well
Sites (which is on WordPress by the way) (http://sites.usa.gov/)

Owen
08-08-2015, 08:15 PM
I'd love to applaud that, but things change quickly. The cheap do it yourself CMS market is coming on strong. The tools are better, and they're easier to use.
Site builders like Go Daddy and others are taking a hit. But you can't discount the big ad push that Squarespace and Wix are doing right now.

I think when the dust settles WP will continue to be what "Professionals" use, and people who need more control and function than what pre-packaged solutions offer, but for the new start up, Mom and Pop who just need a 2-3 page presence with a couple of images and a contact form...people like me have pretty much lost that market.

True, but it could always end up like free blogs did. They used to be big too with Tumblr, Blogger, etc. coming in. Now, no one cares. Everyone either goes to Wordpress.com or hosts it themselves on, you guessed it, Wordpress. You never know, it could always become what 90% of sites are made up of, or, someone will invent a way to make powerful custom scripts without programming knowledge or very little programming knowledge, enabling people to just use their own.

turboguy
08-08-2015, 09:56 PM
As fast as things change on the internet I will be surprised if WordPress is "The Thing" a decade from now. It wasn't much over a decade ago that FrontPage was "The Thing" That wasn't much after things like hit counters, laying out web sites with tables and Frames were all hot.

I have no idea what the next better mousetrap will be but there will be one.

Owen
08-08-2015, 10:53 PM
As fast as things change on the internet I will be surprised if WordPress is "The Thing" a decade from now. It wasn't much over a decade ago that FrontPage was "The Thing" That wasn't much after things like hit counters, laying out web sites with tables and Frames were all hot.

I have no idea what the next better mousetrap will be but there will be one.

Maybe someone will invent a thing where you put it on your head, you imagine what it would look like, then the computer designs it for you :D

billbenson
08-09-2015, 10:18 AM
@ Harold. Why and how do you think WP took over the market?

Harold Mansfield
08-09-2015, 12:58 PM
@ Harold. Why and how do you think WP took over the market?
Because the others dropped the ball.

You could use on your own hosting and was open source. And they did a good job at documentation, and support articles.

All the other emerging CMS and Blog platforms at the time were proprietary and hosted. There was little style customization, bad support, and it was hard to implement or add any functionality because they blocked you from adding any code other than HTML and CSS.

Google, Yahoo and Microsoft were trying to build blogging communities within their own ecosystem, which really kind of backfired when they started becoming spam havens that they couldn't police effectively.

WordPress let you take it were ever you wanted (no subdomains), and do to it whatever you had the talent to do. AND they stayed on top of the updates. Constant improvements. They never let up and still don't.

Of the other CMS's where you could self host, they were and still continue to be ridiculously difficult to administer for the average person so for designers it made it hard to sell them as realistic solutions to small businesses in an era where more and more people want to do as much as they can in house.

WordPress was and still continues to be an easy sell to business owners who like the fact that there's an admin panel to log into to control their website. Even if they never learn to use it, the fact that it's there is a big deal for people who've had websites since the beginning and are used to paying someone $500 just to change a sentence on a page because it was all buried in code.

It also seemed like no one could see the potential of a CMS outside of blogs, or the potential of blogs as an integrated part of a business website and online marketing. And it seemed like Google actually leaned into that curve even though they didn't implement it themselves with blogger.

WordPress made the attempt to make it easily accessible, they nurtured their community of developers, they focused on it having a user friendly admin panel ( not perfect, but learnable), but it was the plug in developers..specifically the ones that started making SEO tools and enhancements.. that made it really take off.

And then the magical explosion of social media was the icing on the cake. People were consuming information at a record pace..literally by the minute. Having the ability to post articles and information from your website became a necessity. By then WordPress was already growing share and it was too late for the others to catch up. They were too far behind and no one wanted to have their website one place and blog on another.

Basically they just made the all the right moves when everyone else was stumbling because they wanted to retain all of the control and could only think one way at the time. They made it easier for the average joe to get online with something of quality, and that was customizable and scalable to be used for more than just blogs, and then social media link sharing put the icing on the cake. That's how they got the market share.

Is WordPress the best for every situation? Of course not. But it doesn't matter what is technically the "best" is if people can't use it. And that's where so many other CMS's (apps and software too) drop the ball.

This is all just my opinion of course.

Owen
08-09-2015, 03:04 PM
Because the others dropped the ball.

You could use on your own hosting and was open source. And they did a good job at documentation, and support articles.

All the other emerging CMS and Blog platforms at the time were proprietary and hosted. There was little style customization, bad support, and it was hard to implement or add any functionality because they blocked you from adding any code other than HTML and CSS.

Google, Yahoo and Microsoft were trying to build blogging communities within their own ecosystem, which really kind of backfired when they started becoming spam havens that they couldn't police effectively.

WordPress let you take it were ever you wanted (no subdomains), and do to it whatever you had the talent to do. AND they stayed on top of the updates. Constant improvements. They never let up and still don't.

Of the other CMS's where you could self host, they were and still continue to be ridiculously difficult to administer for the average person so for designers it made it hard to sell them as realistic solutions to small businesses in an era where more and more people want to do as much as they can in house.

WordPress was and still continues to be an easy sell to business owners who like the fact that there's an admin panel to log into to control their website. Even if they never learn to use it, the fact that it's there is a big deal for people who've had websites since the beginning and are used to paying someone $500 just to change a sentence on a page because it was all buried in code.

It also seemed like no one could see the potential of a CMS outside of blogs, or the potential of blogs as an integrated part of a business website and online marketing. And it seemed like Google actually leaned into that curve even though they didn't implement it themselves with blogger.

WordPress made the attempt to make it easily accessible, they nurtured their community of developers, they focused on it having a user friendly admin panel ( not perfect, but learnable), but it was the plug in developers..specifically the ones that started making SEO tools and enhancements.. that made it really take off.

Basically they just made the all the right moves when everyone else was stumbling because they wanted to retain all of the control and could only think one way at the time. They made it easier for the average joe to get online with something of quality, and that was scalable. That's how they got the market share.

Is WordPress the best for every situation? Of course not. But it doesn't matter what is technically the "best" is if people can't use it. And that's where so many other CMS's (apps and software too) drop the ball.

This is all just my opinion of course.

Wordpress is capable of pretty much ANYTHING if you have the talent.

billbenson
08-09-2015, 06:34 PM
Wordpress is capable of pretty much ANYTHING if you have the talent.

I think that is an overstretch. It is a good program that many lay people can figure out and use. Beyond that there are many developers / designers that know it.

What you are suggesting is that a Ferrari is good for off road mud truck driving with the proper knowledge. That is BS and you know it.

There are a lot of good CMS's out there. There are a lot of good custom websites. It depends on what your requirements are.

Owen
08-09-2015, 07:56 PM
I think that is an overstretch. It is a good program that many lay people can figure out and use. Beyond that there are many developers / designers that know it.

What you are suggesting is that a Ferrari is good for off road mud truck driving with the proper knowledge. That is BS and you know it.

There are a lot of good CMS's out there. There are a lot of good custom websites. It depends on what your requirements are.

Name something that isn't possible with Wordpress (that of course isn't back end like a custom control panel such as cPanel) but something front end. Chances are someone with PHP knowledge can do it with Wordpress.

Brian Altenhofel
08-11-2015, 04:01 AM
Name something that isn't possible with Wordpress (that of course isn't back end like a custom control panel such as cPanel) but something front end. Chances are someone with PHP knowledge can do it with Wordpress.

cPanel is a front end.

Wordpress APIs make it very difficult to build reasonably complex things. Can it be done? Sure. But once you start getting into reasonably complex applications, you begin fighting the APIs. When you're having to fight APIs, that's a sure sign it is not anywhere close to the right tool for the job. It also doesn't help that the APIs are built around PHP4 philosophy and also encourage bad practices (such as placing business logic in the presentation layer or making developers responsible for sanitizing output from Wordpress APIs that should have been sanitized by default). Building things like forums and e-commerce (all but the most basic use cases) generates much more developer overhead than necessary.

Harold Mansfield
08-11-2015, 11:29 AM
What do you mean by "reasonably complex things". Can you give an example?

Brian Altenhofel
08-11-2015, 04:33 PM
What do you mean by "reasonably complex things". Can you give an example?

I gave two previously.


Building things like forums and e-commerce (all but the most basic use cases) generates much more developer overhead than necessary.

ERP systems, resource booking (event tickets, hotel rooms, rental cars, conferences, etc.), infrastructure front end, help desk...

Harold Mansfield
08-11-2015, 06:01 PM
ERP systems, resource booking (event tickets, hotel rooms, rental cars, conferences, etc.), infrastructure front end, help desk...

People run these things on WordPress. There are many premium add ons that are ready out of the box, or custom functions can be easily created.
Integration with mobile apps, QR codes, bar codes, NFC check ins. It's all doable and not really that complex.

Also, every thing doesn't have to be integrated into the WordPress architecture just because the site's foundation is WordPress. You can add pages with any functionality on them that you want, connected to any 3rd party database that lets you.

Pretty much any CRM, Concierge, and Booking software can be integrated into a WordPress site. Companies are aware that it's heavily used and make WordPress tools and integration scripts and API's readily available. Pretty much expected at this point.

WordPress is only limited by the person using it. If you can build it, you can build it. Doesn't matter if you're using HTML, Joomla, WordPress, Bootstrap, or anything else.

Brian Altenhofel
08-12-2015, 12:10 AM
People run these things on WordPress.

I never said they don't. I said the developer overhead (and therefore the accumulating technical debt) is much more than it should be, largely due to a PHP4 architecture (that will likely not be improved to a modern architecture until the powers that be see that backwards compatibility should not be a first class citizen).

Harold Mansfield
08-12-2015, 01:34 AM
I never said they don't. I said the developer overhead (and therefore the accumulating technical debt) is much more than it should be, largely due to a PHP4 architecture (that will likely not be improved to a modern architecture until the powers that be see that backwards compatibility should not be a first class citizen).

Dude, I have to be honest..I've been doing this a long time and sometimes I have no idea what you're saying.
All I can says is that WordPress runs in the latest version of PHP.

The release number of WordPress does not coincide with a version of PHP. WordPress 4.2.2 runs on PHP 5.4 (or greater).

As far as "accumulating technical debt", and "developer overhead"...I don't know what all that means. Can you dumb it down for me?

Brian Altenhofel
08-12-2015, 08:05 PM
The release number of WordPress does not coincide with a version of PHP. WordPress 4.2.2 runs on PHP 5.4 (or greater).

I didn't say it does. For compatibility reasons, WP is still largely built around PHP4 procedural programming and paradigms. Treating backward compatibility as a first class citizen rather than a byproduct of forward compatibility, issues like this one are created (https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/30482) (WP hasn't officially supported PHP4 since 3.2, but yet still maintains code whose only purpose is PHP4-compatibility).

Another example of this is in the recent add_query_args() XSS vulnerability. That function (https://developer.wordpress.org/reference/functions/add_query_arg/) relies on func_get_args() to process a finite amount of arguments (documentation specifies that only 3 are valid, but technically speaking you can pass more that will just be ignored) from a signature-less function. The right fix for that vulnerability would be to have add_query_args() always return sanitized output by default with an optional parameter being explicitly set to bypass sanitization, but instead it's just "update the docs and tell everyone to wrap calls to that function in esc_url()." Rather than allowing site owners to trust that proper use of core APIs will result in secure code, now site owners will need to audit every plugin or theme they use that calls add_query_args() or remove_query_args(). A quick search on Github found a lot of projects still not escaping their output properly 4 months later.

The current architecture also does not allow for easily using alternative data storage which is essential when you get into projects with even moderate levels of traffic. For example, in e-commerce, once an order is completed (definition of "complete" varies from business to business) it is immutable. Between the time it is placed and the time that it is final, there are very few (and often no) changes. At that point, an order is a document. There are many systems much better suited to storing documents than MySQL, but the only way to use those technologies in WP is to bypass WP completely. Rather than encouraging developers to query MySQL directly, a little abstraction would go a long way here toward modernization.


As far as "accumulating technical debt", and "developer overhead"...I don't know what all that means. Can you dumb it down for me?

Technical debt is the result of system design choices over time. Like any other form of debt, it accumulates over time unless you pay it down (most often via refactoring). Every line of code is something that must be maintained in the future. Treating backwards compatibility as a first class citizen builds up a lot of code that must be maintained but may no longer be relevant and may even encourage bad practices.

Developer overhead is time spent doing things that should not be necessary to achieve their goal.