CMS
In this chapter, we interpret the evolving landscape of the Content Management System (CMS) and its increasing influence on how users experience content on the web. We aim to explore both the broader CMS ecosystem and the unique characteristics of web pages created through these platforms.
CMS platforms are pivotal in the collective effort to build a fast, resilient web. By examining their current state, asking critical questions, and identifying areas for future exploration, we can better understand their impact on web performance and user experience.
This year, we’ve approached the data with curiosity and expertise in several popular CMSs. We encourage you to view our analysis through the lens of CMS variability and the diverse types of content they support.
What is a CMS?
A Content Management System (CMS) is a tool that allows individuals and organizations to create, manage, and publish digital content, particularly on the web. A web-based CMS enables the seamless creation and management of websites while prioritizing user experience for both creators and visitors.
CMS platforms offer a variety of features for users to build websites, from user-friendly templates to more customizable options that require user input in the design and structure of the site. They also include administrative tools to simplify content management.
CMSs vary significantly in their approach to site creation. Some offer ready-made templates and drag-and-drop block builders, while others require users to design layouts and site structures. Regardless of approach, a CMS is supported by an ecosystem that typically includes hosting providers, extension developers, web agencies, and site builders.
In this chapter of the Web Almanac, we explore the entire ecosystem surrounding CMS platforms for 2023 and 2024, respectively. When we refer to a CMS, we mean the platform itself and the associated services and tools that form its ecosystem.
Based on Wappalyzer’s CMS definition, our dataset identifies 249 individual CMS platforms.
Some CMSs are open source, like WordPress and Joomla, while others are proprietary, such as Wix and Squarespace. These platforms offer hosting options, from free and self-hosted plans to premium, enterprise-level services.
The CMS landscape is a diverse and interconnected ecosystem, with platforms that differ in functionality, scale, and user experience.
CMS Adoption
Our analysis covers both desktop and mobile websites. While most URLs appeared in both datasets, some were accessed exclusively by desktop or mobile devices. We analyzed desktop and mobile results separately to account for these differences and avoid discrepancies.
As of June 2024, 51% of the websites in the Web Almanac’s desktop dataset were powered by a CMS, a steady increase compared to 2022. The mobile dataset shows an increase from 48% in 2022 to 51% in 2024.
Looking closer at the raw desktop figures, we see a positive trend, with a clear bump registered in 2023. This is supported by data in both absolute and percentage terms, with the number of desktop URLs tracked by HTTP Archive (and the source CrUX dataset) growing from 5.4 million in July 2022 to 12.7 million in June 2024. The number of tracked mobile URLs, respectively, also reflects a booming growth in mobile device usage, with an increase of 8.6 million mobile URLs in the dataset for 2023 and a slight drop in 2024.
It’s important to note that our analysis differs from other commonly used datasets, such as W3Techs. These deviations are due to differing research methodologies and definitions of what qualifies as a CMS, which impact the final statistics.
For instance, as mentioned earlier, Wappalyzer uses a more strict definition of a CMS than we do, excluding some significant platforms that appear in W3Tech’s reports. You can learn more about our CMS criteria in the Methodology.
CMS adoption by geography
As of June 2024, CMS adoption worldwide has grown steadily, matching our dataset’s increased number of tracked URLs.
This year, unlike our analysis in 2022, we differentiate between countries and regions to offer better insights into geographical CMS usage.
CMS adoption is highest in Italy and Spain, where 46% to 44% (40% to 41% in 2022) of mobile sites are built with a CMS. Brazil and Indonesia have the lowest adoption rates, with only 32% and 24%, respectively. Japan is seeing steady growth in mobile CMS adoption—39% in 2024 compared to 32% in 2022. Conversely, India shows a slight decrease in adoption (2% since June 2022). This can be attributed to the growing dataset and tracked URL increase, which helps us better understand the Indian web development market.
The year-over-year (YoY) analysis for mobile results shows consistent growth across countries, putting to rest some of our 2022 speculations for a wholesale drop in CMS adoption.
Let’s explore what the CMS adoption rate by region reveals.
Following the trends in the country breakdown, Europe takes the lead with 46% for mobile results in CMS adoption rates. There are no discrepancies in the generated numbers followed by Oceania and the Americas. (44% and 42%, respectively.). It’s important to note that North America has a 44% rate of mobile CMS adoption across 1.5 million site pages, as shown in our CMS adoption by subregion graph below.
CMS adoption by rank
We examined CMS adoption by the estimated rank of the sites included within the dataset.
According to the dataset, CMSs are used by approximately 8% of the top 1,000 websites for both desktop and mobile, even though 49% of all mobile sites in the dataset use a CMS.
This has been an ongoing trend for the past few years, most likely attributed to business’s size relative to its web development needs. Smaller businesses (represented by a large chunk of our dataset here) tend to use popular CMSs for their affordability and usability. In these cases, it’s often easy to identify their CMS.
In contrast, larger businesses with higher-ranking websites often use custom-built CMS solutions that we can’t readily identify. They are also more likely to obfuscate the identity of their CMS. It is improbable that more than 90% of the top 1,000 would forgo a CMS entirely.It’s much more likely that they don’t appear in our dataset.
Top-ranking websites aside, this year, a significant CMS adoption decrease was observed across all rank groups. The total percentage of websites using a CMS dropped 15% from 39% in 2022, which we suspect is primarily due to the increased size of our dataset in 2024.
A potentially correlated trend is the adoption of “headless” CMSs and the move to separate content—and the CMS that powers it—from the frontend experience offered to end-users. Another plausible explanation is the smaller size of our dataset compared to the tracked URLs used for the YoY CMS adoption rate, where we observe consistent growth.
Most popular CMSs
Let’s look a little more into the top CMS’s.
Top 5 CMS adoption growth
Among all websites that use an identifiable CMS, WordPress sites account for the majority of the relative market share—with over 35% adoption on mobile in 2024—followed by Wix (2.8%), Joomla (1.5%), Squarespace (1.5%), and Drupal (1.2%).
Comparing YoY, Drupal and Joomla continue to decline in market share while Squarespace and Wix grow (0.5% and 0.8%, respectively). WordPress continues its ascent, increasing 0.6% on mobile over 2023-2024 This represents a slower pace of growth than in previous years.
CMS user experience
With the introduction of Core Web Vitals four years ago, user experience has become a priority. That said, while users were mainly comparing CMS platforms based on ease of use, number of plugins/extensions, and themes available, they added one additional criterion—the default user experience offered by a particular platform.
To examine these experiences, we gathered data from the Chrome User Experience Report (CrUX) and interrogated three specific metrics:
- Core Web Vitals
- Lighthouse scores
- Resource weights
Core Web Vitals
Google’s Core Web Vitals are a set of three user-centric performance metrics that measure critical aspects of user experience, focusing on loading speed, interactivity, and visual stability:
- Largest Contentful Paint (loading)
- Interaction to Next Paint (interactivity)
- Cumulative Layout Shift (visual stability)
Since their introduction in 2020 and becoming a ranking signal in 2021, CWV are now recognized as essential to delivering a good user experience across the web.
If you’re interested in how websites perform against the Core Web Vitals on a larger scale, the Performance chapter covers this topic in greater detail.
In this section, we are interested in looking at the Core Web Vitals specifically in the context of CMS platforms.
There are 200+ known CMS platforms, but we narrowed our list to the top 10 most used CMSs, considering they have more than 85% market share. We used the Core Web Vitals Technology Report, which provides a global overview of how different technologies perform in relation to Google’s Core Web Vitals.
Below is the percentage of sites on each platform that score “good” (LCP under 2.5s; INP under 200ms; CLS below 0.1) for all three Core Web Vitals:
We decided to focus primarily on mobile results for three reasons:
- As of July 2024, mobile has a 68.29% global traffic share
- Mobile devices have resource and connectivity limitations, which paint a more realistic picture of how everyday users experience the web
- All CMS platforms, and technologies in general, score better on desktop
Putting that aside, we can see that all 10 CMS platforms improved their Core Web Vitals, with Squarespace leading the board with a whopping 28% YoY improvement. The top 3 include Wix with 18% and 1C-Bitrix with 14%. The list then goes as follows: WordPress (11% YoY), Tilda (11% YoY), Duda (11% YoY), Drupal (10% YoY), and Weebly (10% YoY). At the bottom are TYPO3 CMS with 9% and Joomla with 8%.
These YoY improvements are as remarkable as the overall Core Web Vitals pass rate the top 10 CMSs collectively provide. For reference, the global CWV pass rate for all origins as of June 2024 is 51%.
Having platforms like Duda, TYPO3 CMS, and Squarespace with results way north of that is a testament to the efforts these platforms have put into enhancing user experience.
Now, let’s drill into the three Core Web Vitals to see where each platform can improve and which metrics improved the most since 2023.
Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)
Largest Contentful Paint measures how long it takes for the largest above-the-fold element to load on a page. Anything under 2.5 seconds is considered a “good” LCP score.
This metric represents how quickly users can see what is likely the most meaningful content on a web page.
Of the three Core Web Vitals, LCP is the hardest to optimize. That’s why LCP pass rates are the lowest and LCP is considered the bottleneck to passing CWVs.
The reason why LCP is such a challenging metric is that there are a lot of moving parts when it comes to its optimization. You need to:
- Ensure the LCP resource starts loading as early as possible.
- Ensure the LCP element can be rendered as soon as its resource finishes loading.
- Reduce the load time of the LCP resource as much as you can without sacrificing quality.
- Deliver the initial HTML document as fast as possible.
However, the top 10 CMSs showed some impressive results when it comes to their YoY LCP improvements and overall scores:
Before diving into the YoY stats, take note that the global LCP pass rate (as of June 2024) is 63.4%. As you can see from the graph, more than half of the platforms achieve better results.
Considering how much they have improved since 2023, Squarespace is again ahead of the other CMSs with a YoY improvement of 27%. Wix is in second place with 13%, and WordPress is third with 11%. The remaining platforms improved by less than 10%.
Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)
Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) is a metric used to measure layout stability. It reflects how much content unexpectedly shifts on the screen.
A website is considered to have good CLS if at least 75% of all site visits score 0.1 or lower.
Comparing yearly data shows that the CLS results aren’t as impressive as the LCP or the overall CWV pass rates. Most platforms made little progress, while Duda, Wix, and Weebly struggled to improve their 2023 results.
Interaction to Next Paint (INP)
After being announced in 2023 and in an experimental phase for the rest of the year, Interaction to Next Paint officially replaced First Input Delay (FID) as the new interactivity Core Web Vitals metric on March 12, 2024.
INP assesses a page’s responsiveness to user interactions by observing the latency of all qualifying interactions during a user’s visit to a page. The final INP value is the longest interaction observed.
Simply put, the newest Core Web Vital measures the time from the interaction (for example, a mouse click) until the browser can update (or paint) the screen.
An INP below or at 200 milliseconds means a page has good responsiveness.
Considering the whole interaction latency, including input delay, processing time, and presentation delay, the introduction of INP led to a global drop in the Core Web Vitals pass rate.
That said, the YoY improvement and overall CWV pass rate demonstrated by the top 10 CMSs is even more impressive, considering the big changes INP introduced.
When it comes to their INP score, the majority of platforms achieve a pass rate of 80% or above:
The CMSs that fail to pass include Tilda and 1C-Bitrix, which, despite the YoY improvement, still struggle to achieve the global standard of 84.1%.
The Deprecation of FID
First Input Delay is no longer a Core Web Vitals metric. Furthermore, Chrome officially deprecated support for FID on September 9, 2024.
The primary reasons for INP replacing FID include the scope of measurement and comprehensiveness.
Looking at the Web Almanac’s previous editions we can see that all websites had a good FID score on desktop, and nearly all on mobile. This data should indicate that visitors rarely experience a laggy website.
Unfortunately, the reality is that the web often does have a responsiveness problem. And FID was no longer accurately measuring it.
The issue with FID was that it only measured the delay for the first input, ignoring the processing time and presentation delay and failing to capture the page’s responsiveness throughout the user’s entire session.
In contrast, INP evaluates the responsiveness of the entire page throughout the user’s session, providing a more comprehensive and accurate representation of the user experience.
Lighthouse
Lighthouse is an open-source, automated tool designed to improve the quality of web pages by providing a set of audits that evaluate websites based on 4 categories:
- Performance
- Accessibility
- SEO
- Best Practices
Lighthouse generates reports with lab data that offer developers actionable suggestions for enhancing website performance. However, it’s important to note that Lighthouse scores do not directly impact the real-world field data collected by CrUX. You can further explore how Lighthouse lab scores and field data differ.
The HTTP Archive runs Lighthouse on mobile and desktop web pages, simulating a slow 4G connection with throttled CPU performance for mobile.
By analyzing this data, we can gain a different perspective on CMS performance through synthetic tests, which also capture metrics not monitored by CrUX.
Performance score
The Lighthouse performance score is a weighted average of several scored metrics.
Compared to the 2022 results, where the median performance scores for most mobile platforms ranged from about 19 to 35, we observe impressive improvements for both mobile and desktop websites in 2024.
Wix and Duda stand out as clear leaders with median desktop performance scores of 85 and 80, respectively, and Duda achieving higher scores on mobile. Next come Weebly, Drupal, TYPO3 CMS, WordPress, and Squarespace, representing median performance scores marked with the orange “Needs Improvement” status, according to the Lighthouse color-coding scheme.
The overall positive trend is due to native and technological improvements in browsers and CMSs, which indicates an overall recognition of the importance of high-quality web performance.
The major increase shown by proprietary platforms such as Wix and Duda is partly connected to how the CMSs operate—meaning they benefit from a streamlined, centralized development that allows greater speed for innovation in the performance field.
As we’ve concluded in previous years, the lower mobile scores are an opportunity for smarter solutions, and optimizations focused on low-end devices with unstable network connections similar to those Lighthouse attempts to emulate. Moreover, it’s inherent for mobile devices to fall behind their desktop counterparts, given the faster CPUs and networks available. Nonetheless, the 2024 results are encouraging, and we’ll continue to track how CMS platforms fare regarding Lighthouse performance metrics.
Year-over-year performance trends
The YoY performance data from 2023 to 2024 reveals an encouraging trend of incremental improvements among top CMS platforms. Duda and Wix continue to lead in mobile performance, with Duda improving from a median Lighthouse score of 56 to 59 and Wix rising from 50 to 55. WordPress also shows improvement, increasing from 33 to 38, alongside Joomla and Drupal, which moved from 35 to 39 and 36 to 40, respectively. These results reflect a broader industry focus on optimizing mobile performance, although some platforms, such as Squarespace and Weebly, showed only minor gains. These varied improvements highlight the ongoing challenges and priorities across CMS platforms as they work toward enhanced user experiences on mobile devices.
SEO score
Search Engine Optimization (or SEO) is the practice of improving the quality and quantity of visitors to a website or a web page from a website to make it more easily found in search engines. This topic is covered in our SEO chapter, but it also relates to CMSs.
A CMS and content on it is generally set up to serve as much information to search engine crawlers as possible to make it as easy as possible for them to index site content appropriately in search engine results. Compared to a custom-built website, one might expect a CMS to provide good SEO capabilities, and the Lighthouse scores in this category remain appropriately high.
The median SEO scores in the top 10 platforms range from 85-100, an impressive increase from 82-92 in 2022. Given the high median performance scores, it is no surprise Wix takes the lead in SEO as well, scoring a perfect 100 for both mobile and desktop. With median scores as high as 92 for mobile and desktop, the runner-ups provide users with robust SEO best practices.
Year-over-year SEO trends
The year-over-year comparison from 2023 to 2024 reveals consistently high SEO scores across the top CMS platforms, with most maintaining or slightly improving their median scores. This stability at the high end suggests that CMS platforms are prioritizing SEO best practices, ensuring that users have solid foundations for search engine visibility.
Accessibility score
An accessible website is a site designed and developed so that people with disabilities can use them. Web accessibility also benefits people without disabilities, such as those on slow internet connections. Read more in our Accessibility chapter.
Lighthouse provides a set of accessibility audits and returns a weighted average of all of them. See scoring details for a full list of how each audit is weighted.
Each accessibility audit is either a pass or a fail, but unlike other Lighthouse audits, a page doesn’t get points for partially passing an accessibility audit. For example, if some elements have screen reader-friendly names but others don’t, that page gets a zero for the screen reader-friendly names audit.
In 2024, the median Lighthouse accessibility score for the top 10 CMSs ranges between 74 and 95, a slight improvement from 77 to 91 in 2022. Squarespace has lost the top space by a fraction to Wix, which hits the 94 and 95 marks for mobile and desktop, respectively. 1C-Bitrix had the lowest accessibility scores in 2024 and shows a slight decrease of 2 points for both desktop and mobile, perhaps reflecting that the same sites are delivered to both desktop and mobile devices.
Year-over-year accessibility trends
