According to W3Techs, almost 55% of the 1 million most visited websites that are run on a content management system (CMS) are run on WordPress. WordPress is a darn fine CMS and is stable and easy to use, but so are Joomla and Drupal. So, why does WordPress have the lion’s share of the top 1 million websites?
This article does not set out to prove that one CMS is “better” than another. WordPress, Joomla, Drupal and dozens of other platforms are mature, stable, great CMS’ that can do a fantastic job in most cases.
Market Share
As a point of reference, at Gravity Switch, about 50% of our projects are in Drupal and about 35% in WordPress; the rest are in other CMS’ or written by hand in PHP or built on a framework such as CakePHP, Django or Ruby. Some of you might be squirming in your seats asking, “But why don’t you just use [insert your CMS of choice]?” The answer is simple: blind luck.
A couple of our top clients asked us to use Drupal or WordPress (based on their own technical requirements or preferences), so right now we have more in-house experience with WordPress and Drupal. Our job is to be flexible and to help our clients do their jobs better. While we’re able to guide the folks who don’t have a preference, our job is not to evangelize one technology over another.
So, rather than attempt to convince you that one CMS is best, I’ll share some data that compares WordPress to Drupal and Joomla in order to understand how and why WordPress got the crown.
Name Recognition
When I want to understand how popular something is, one of the first places I go to is Google Trends. Based on WordPress’ market share, I expected to find that it is searched for about five times as often as Joomla and about nine times as often as Drupal.
It turns out that, internationally, Joomla is almost as well known as WordPress, and Drupal is searched for about a quarter as often.
This data suggests that:
- Out of the top three CMS’ out there (WordPress, Joomla and Drupal), people are choosing WordPress more often.
- People are choosing WordPress without searching for it.
Where WordPress Excels
Let’s be honest. It probably doesn’t matter which of the top 20 CMS’ you choose. (Curious what they are? W3Techs lists them.) They’re all reasonably secure, stable and easy to maintain. While WordPress might have been “just blogging software” for a time and didn’t have the features needed to be a true CMS, those days are gone. Anyone who says otherwise is trolling or living in the past.
By Jason Mark.
Read more: http://wp.smashingmagazine.com