Which Content Management Tools Should I Use, WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, Shopify…?

If you have considered writing on the web in the last decade you will know that good old fashioned .HTML and .ASP editors have died because they only built web pages.  A web site, however, is much more than just pages of content.  There are:

• menus
• formatting
• advertising
• e-commerce
• feedback
• security
• comments
• email lists

and so much more to look after.  All of these things need to be kept current to keep up with today’s browsers and devices not to mention today’s hackers.

To run all of these now core functions, CMS or Content management Systems took hold in the mid-2000’s and now run virtually every website on the planet.  There are hundreds of CMS‘ for you to choose from but as you can see in the graph below, the top 10 CMS’ manage more than 80% of them.

To make this even more clear, you can see in the graph below just how dominant WordPress is:

So the choice seems clear that if you want to stick to a standard, you should seriously consider WordPress.  However, we wanted to flesh out the trends so we removed WordPress from the calculations and came up with this graphic that shows you Shopify, Wix, and Squarespace are the only CMS’ that are growing in market share.

Of note is how Joomla and Drupal have had serious declines in market share. 

These charts show that WordPress has moderately increased it’s market share its primary competitor Joomla and Droopal are about about half as popular today as they were a decade ago.  

So if you want to do something online these days, unless you have a niche requirement, like your primary purpose is eCommerce so you are going to the mighty Shopify, you have little choice but to use WordPress.   Fortunately we can state, from extensive experience, the WordPress is awesome.  Free, with tens of thousands add-ins, themes, and plug-ins has made it the nearly universal choice which makes your decision easy.

In December 2018 our only notable word of caution with WordPress is its brand new text editor named Gutenberg.  It is pretty cool but we think it is about 90% ready for prime time.  Unfortunately, WordPress rolled it into v5.0 which was pushed out globally a couple of weeks ago.  Fortunately, it’s WordPress, so if you hate the new editor, there is a free plugin to roll it back to the old text editor which we explain HERE.

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We have posted the raw numbers at the bottom of this article so you can analyse them any way you want.

.	2009	2010	2011	2012	2013	2014	2015	2016	2017	2018
1 WordPress	0.51	0.553	0.543	0.548	0.598	0.607	0.588	0.585	0.6	0.596
2 Joomla	0.12	0.109	0.095	0.087	0.093	0.086	0.075	0.072	0.065	0.055
3 Drupal	0.071	0.061	0.065	0.072	0.055	0.051	0.049	0.048	0.046	0.036
4 Squarespace	.	0.002	0.002	0.001	0.003	0.005	0.008	0.011	0.015	0.026
5 Shopify	.	.	.	.	0.003	0.007	0.01	0.013	0.018	0.026
6 Magento	.	.	.	.	0.027	0.028	0.029	0.027	0.024	0.019
7 Wix	.	.	.	0.001	0.002	0.003	0.004	0.006	0.009	0.018
8 PrestaShop	.	.	.	0.009	0.011	0.012	0.013	0.013	0.013	0.014
9 Blogger	.	0.027	0.03	0.035	0.033	0.029	0.027	0.024	0.019	0.014
10 TYPO3	0.042	0.026	0.02	0.021	0.016	0.016	0.015	0.014	0.015	0.013