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WordPress leads W3Techs’ September 29, 2026 snapshot, accounting for 58.7% of the CMS market share it tracks and 40.2% of all websites. Shopify, Wix and Squarespace follow at a considerable distance. Those percentages use different denominators: CMS market share counts sites where a monitored CMS is detected, while all-website usage includes the broader website sample.

CMS market share in September 2026

W3Techs’ snapshot, dated September 29, 2026, reports both each platform’s share of all websites and its share among websites where a monitored CMS is detected. The distinction matters: W3Techs says 31.5% of websites use none of the CMSs it monitors, so CMS market-share percentages are not percentages of every website.

Platform Share of all websites Share of detected CMSs
WordPress 40.2% 58.7%
Shopify 5.4% 7.8%
Wix 4.2% 6.1%
Squarespace 2.4% 3.6%
Joomla 1.1% 1.6%
Tilda 0.8% 1.2%
Webflow 0.8% 1.2%
Duda 0.7% 1.1%
Drupal 0.6% 0.9%

Source: W3Techs, Usage Statistics and Market Share of Content Management Systems, snapshot dated September 29, 2026. Percentages are the publisher’s estimates for its monitored web sample.

For example, WordPress’ 58.7% figure means its share of detected CMS use in this snapshot; it does not mean WordPress powers 58.7% of all websites. Its all-website usage figure is 40.2%.

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How CMS market share changed over the year

The September-to-September monthly series shows WordPress losing share among detected CMSs while Shopify, Wix and Squarespace gained. These are percentage-point changes in W3Techs’ measured CMS share, not counts of new customers or a measure of product quality.

CMS September 2025 CMS share September 2026 CMS share Change
WordPress 60.8% 58.9% Down 1.9 percentage points
Shopify 6.7% 7.7% Up 1.0 percentage point
Wix 5.6% 6.1% Up 0.5 percentage point
Squarespace 3.4% 3.5% Up 0.1 percentage point
Joomla 2.0% 1.6% Down 0.4 percentage point
Drupal 1.1% 0.9% Down 0.2 percentage point

Source: W3Techs, market-share trends for content management systems. The monthly-series endpoint values are rounded as published in the trend summary and may differ slightly from the separate September 29 overview snapshot.

W3Techs’ longer view begins at the start of 2025 and ends in September 2026. In that series, WordPress moves from 62.0% to 58.8% of CMS share; Shopify from 6.7% to 7.8%; Wix from 4.6% to 6.2%; Squarespace from 3.2% to 3.6%; Joomla from 2.2% to 1.6%; and Drupal from 1.3% to 0.9%. The slight differences between those endpoint values and the monthly comparison above reflect the publisher’s separate series and snapshots, so dates and series should accompany any comparison.

W3Techs also lists Astro among the fastest-growing CMS technologies by daily increase per million. That growth-velocity measure is different from installed-base share and does not make Astro one of the largest platforms by CMS market share.

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What W3Techs counts as a CMS

W3Techs uses “CMS” broadly. Its category covers software for website content as well as tools often classified as wikis, blog engines, discussion boards, static-site generators, website editors and other website-content software. Its reported category therefore is not limited to traditional editorial publishing systems.

The publisher also groups technologies into subcategories such as ecommerce systems, community platforms, blogging engines, media-gallery builders, news platforms, wiki engines, documentation platforms, customer-support platforms, e-learning systems and webmail clients. When choosing software, a comparison within the relevant job—such as ecommerce or documentation—may be more useful than an overall CMS ranking.

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How W3Techs detects website technologies

W3Techs says it primarily fetches pages in a manner similar to a search engine and analyzes information that websites expose, along with public sources. Its indicators include HTML elements and tags, JavaScript, CSS, URL structures, HTTP headers and responses, DNS and Whois information. It can also infer one technology from another; for example, identifying a WordPress site implies PHP use.

The publisher describes its population as the “relevant web,” not every registered domain. Public surveys are updated daily, while more extensive technology market reports are generated monthly. Some sites are revisited about once a month, and many are crawled beyond their home page. Differences in sample composition, geography, site rankings, counting of subdomains or pages, and detection methods can all affect how providers’ figures compare.

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How to interpret the figures—and their limits

W3Techs says it is impossible for this type of survey to be 100% accurate because websites can hide much of their technology. It balances false positives and false negatives but cannot guarantee that errors are absent. Treat its figures as a consistently tracked estimate for its stated scope, not as an audited census of every website.

  • Compare platforms using the same publisher, snapshot date and denominator.
  • Read “share of all websites” separately from “CMS market share”; do not substitute one for the other.
  • Do not infer platform quality, ease of use, cost, performance, flexibility or support from adoption share alone.
  • For a platform decision, first identify the work the site must do, then compare systems suited to that use case.

HTTP Archive provides another technology-data view, with sections for adoption, performance, page weight and Core Web Vitals. Its CMS comparison output did not provide usable values in the rendered view referenced here, so it should not be combined with W3Techs’ figures or presented as confirmation of the same ranking.

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