What “market share” means here

There are a few ways to measure a CMS’s popularity. Two commonly cited approaches are:

  1. Percentage of all websites (what portion of the entire web runs that CMS).
  2. Absolute site counts from web-technology trackers that try to identify live sites using a given platform.

Both are estimates and will differ because of methodology (how “website” is defined, whether parked/duplicate/redirect sites are counted, how samples are collected). I’ll show both so you can see the picture.

Top CMS platforms in 2025 (short list with numbers)

1. WordPress

  • Share: ~43.3% of all websites (and about 60–61% of sites that run a recognised CMS).
  • Known live sites: ~37.5 million sites tracked as active WordPress installs. BuiltWith has larger historical totals too. 

2. Shopify

  • Share: ~4.8% of all websites (roughly 6.8% of sites that use a CMS). 
  • Known live sites : ~6.2 million Shopify sites in BuiltWith’s live dataset.

3. Wix

  • Share: ~4.1% of all websites (≈5.7% of CMS-using sites).
  • Known live sites : ~8.66 million live Wix sites in BuiltWith’s index. 

4. Squarespace

  • Share: ~2.4% of all websites (≈3.4% of CMS sites). 
  • Known live sites: ~6.67 million live Squarespace sites in their index.

5. Joomla

  • Share: ~1.4% of all websites (≈2.0% of CMS sites). 
  • Known live sites: ~781,000 live Joomla sites tracked. 

6. Webflow

  • Share: ~0.9% of all websites (≈1.2% of CMS sites). 
  • Known live sites: ~642,000 live Webflow sites. 

7. Drupal

  • Share: ~0.8% of all websites (≈1.1% of CMS sites). 
  • Known live sites : ~424,000 live Drupal sites. 

Important caveats (read these!)

  • Different data, different definitions: W3Techs reports percentages of all websites (their monitored sample) and the relative market share among sites that use a recognised CMS. BuiltWith reports counts based on the sites it crawls and recognises — that gives useful absolute numbers but is not a perfect count of “every website on the internet.” 
  • “All websites” is huge and noisy: The internet contains many inactive, parked, duplicate or private sites. That’s why percentages (W3Techs) and live-site counts (BuiltWith) won’t match exactly. Choose the metric that matters for you: percentage for relative market dominance; counts if you want a feel for how many live sites a vendor has in trackers. 
  • Numbers move fast: New sites are launched, platforms change policies, and crawlers update daily — so figures can shift month-to-month. The sources I used (W3Techs for percentage shares and BuiltWith for tracked live-site counts) are widely cited and update regularly.

Bottom line (for a novice)

  • WordPress dominates — by a very large margin — both as a share of the web and as the CMS used by the majority of sites that run a CMS. (W3Techs)
  • Shopify, Wix and Squarespace are the next most visible platforms (especially for online shops and easy-to-build websites), each with several million live sites in web trackers. (BuiltWith)