Content Management Systems in 2026

Understanding platform share is a key data point for deciding where you should build a new product or a new feature. Choosing a tech stack or a platform is a decision that should be based on the data, not a guess.

WordPress is still most of the named web. Drupal, Joomla, and OpenCart are smaller than they were, and they have been getting smaller for years. Shopify, Wix, and Squarespace took a large part of that ground over the past decade. And in the last year, sites with no monitored CMS grew as well.

The figures below are from W3Techs on 20 October 2026, and from the HTTP Archive 2025 Web Almanac (July 2025 crawl, published January 2026).

W3Techs reports two percentages. All sites includes everyone in the survey. CMS share is the share among sites where a monitored CMS was detected. On 20 October 2026, 32.1% of sites had no monitored CMS, so they sit in the all-sites figure and drop out of CMS share.

The Web Almanac uses the HTTP Archive crawl and Wappalyzer fingerprints. Its CMS chapter puts a CMS on 55% of desktop sites and 54% of mobile sites in 2025, up from 42% and 43% in 2021. A tool that leaves no fingerprint is invisible to both surveys. Headless fronts and many static generators stay in "none" until a detector learns their signature.

CMS share from the yearly W3Techs series.

Read the first number as "of the whole web" and the second as "of sites with a CMS the survey can name." Language is the one the system is written in. WordPress at 39.6% and 58.3% is both at once: a minority of all sites, and a majority of the named ones. Lovable, Astro, and Framer are on the list because they are now large enough to count. They are still a fraction of one percent.

The last twelve months look different from the decade, and they are worth separating. Across the decade, hosted builders and Shopify took share from the general open-source CMSs. Across the last year, most of the absolute drop in WordPress lined up with growth in sites that have no named CMS. The builders were nearly flat in that shorter window.

WooCommerce is still the largest store platform. Its share of detected stores fell. Shopify took that ground. OpenCart fell from 2.3% to 1.9% of detected stores in the year. On the longer all-sites ecommerce series, OpenCart peaked at 0.6% of all sites in 2021 and 2022 and sits at 0.3% now. PrestaShop moved from 3.4% to 2.8% of detected stores over the recent year.

The 2025 Web Almanac ecommerce chapter ranks the same four in the same order, from a July 2025 crawl: WooCommerce 35.4% of detected stores, Shopify 21.5%, PrestaShop 3.2%, OpenCart 1.1%. The percentages differ because the crawl differs. The order matches.

Overall share hides where the busiest sites actually live. On 20 October 2026, among sites with a known CMS (WordPress, Drupal, and Adobe by rank, and WooCommerce, Shopify, and Drupal by rank):

• Drupal is 0.9% of known CMS sites overall and 6.7% of the top 10,000.
• Adobe Systems is 0.9% overall and 6.9% of the top 10,000.
• WordPress is 58.3% overall, 48.3% of the top million, and 50.5% of the top 10,000.
• Shopify is 7.9% overall, 15.8% of the top million, and 4.1% of the top 10,000.
• WooCommerce is 11.5% overall and 1.3% of the top 10,000.

Among the top 10,000, Drupal is about 6-7% of CMS usage, well above its share of the wider web, and Wix and Shopify are scarce at that traffic level. WordPress was 64.3% of mobile CMS usage in that same period. Its growth was under one point year over year, with a slight decline from the 2024 peak. The Almanac reads that slowdown as saturation, with new growth spread across several platforms.

Commerce - The shop is leaving the self-hosted cart. Shopify's increase, beside the decline in OpenCart, PrestaShop, and WooCommerce's share of stores, is the clearest move in the data. Checkout, catalogue, and apps now live mostly in a hosted admin. WooCommerce remains the largest store system, but with a declining trend.

Hosting - Wix and Squarespace spent a decade turning "I do not want to run a server" into CMS share. Webflow has become the studio version of this, and has been flat in the 2026 W3Techs series. Duda is the white-label version, still a small rise, and often sold by agencies as many sites under one account.

Custom builds - This is the open question, and the one most tied to the last year. Sites with no monitored CMS rose by 3.5 points while WordPress fell by 3.7 points of all sites. This is the work that never announces a CMS: static generators, headless fronts, and one reading of this data is a noticeable increase in AI-assisted scaffolding and self builds. That's excluding Lovable, Astro, and Framer, which are on the list because they are now large enough to count, but they are still a fraction of one percent.

Another reading is detection. On the longer 2021-2025 window, the Web Almanac shows CMS adoption rising, which means sites without a detected CMS were shrinking across those five years. A site becomes "a CMS site" the day the survey learns to see it. Hold the self-build story as plausible. Hold it lightly as the main cause. The decade in the yearly table is hosted builders and Shopify taking share from Joomla, Drupal, and, since 2022, from WordPress.

The top of the web - Drupal and Adobe are several times more common in the top 10,000 than on the open web. A university, a public body, and a national brand are choosing from a different list than a new brochure site. Overall decline for Drupal is largely the long tail leaving, but the busy sites remain.

Managed defaults - The Web Almanac's mobile Core Web Vitals comparison for 2025 puts about 45% of WordPress sites in the good band. Wix moved from about 55% to 74%. Duda sat near 85%. A platform that controls the theme, the host, and the scripts can lift the median. An open CMS leaves that work with the people who run the site. Some of the share moving towards builders is that operational saving, paid as a subscription.

The price of a first version - Scaffolding a site is cheap. Owning the architecture remains expensive: hosting, updates, accessibility, backups, and an editor and business logic a colleague can repeat next year. A rise in self-build activity is a sign that AI-assisted scaffolding is now good enough to deliver the first version. And it may not be long before we see a generation of systems that have no declared dependency at all.

Keep the system when it still covers the requirements, that is the honest advice.

Stay on a release line that still receives security updates is the most important action to take right now. Our recent post Zero-day PHP vulnerabilities in the wild covered two critical flaws, and give you clear reason you need to stay on top of your DevOps! An old version is a vulnerability: core, plugins, and modules that no longer get patches.

A self-build is a great option when you want to own the codebase, and you can carry the extra work to replace your existing CMS. Using an AI assistant you can scaffold a site quickly, then continue to use your assistant to maintain it. But today this is not reliable and safeguards are needed. So someone still needs to patch it, host it, keep it accessible, and guide the business logic unless you're comfortable leading the fringe in AI-assisted workflows.

The admin around the system is the part that is changing the most, and the CMS layer can stay the same as you currently have. The traditional web login will fade away as agents are given access to your CMS, making them a headless system for your content needs. Arc is the version we are building; connecting your CMS and tools to agents that can reliably manage your content. Agents for everyday business is the same idea at the width of a company, and the landscape, not a score is the picture those agents should be reading.

The charts will keep moving. W3Techs refreshes daily, and the next Web Almanac will move the July 2025 baseline. A supported system that people and agents can work on will still be the right one when the percentages change. Arc is where we are building that layer.