W3Techs Ranks WordPress as the Fastest Growing CMS of 2016

photo credit: Luis Llerena

W3Techs published its Web Technologies of 2016 report today, compiling technologies that saw the largest increase in usage last year. The survey pulls data from the top 10 million sites (according to Alexa rankings) and compares the number of sites for each technology by measuring the difference from January 1, 2016 to January 1, 2017.

W3Techs ranks WordPress as the fastest growing content management system with 58.5% market share. Shopify and Squarespace demonstrated the second and third largest increases in usage. Squarespace is a newcomer to the top three. In 2015 the second and third place winners were Drupal and Shopify. WordPress has dominated the top spot every year since 2010.

CMS usage on the whole saw a 3.3% increase. Of the top 15 CMS’s only six demonstrated growth, including the aforementioned top three, as well as Joomla, Drupal, and Bitrix, which showed nominal 0.1% increases in market share by the end of 2016. Blogger is on the decline, and the remaining CMS’s showed no increase or decrease.

PHP regained its top ranking among server-side programming languages as the fastest growing in 2016, a title which it temporarily lost to Java in 2015. W3Techs estimates PHP to be used by 82.4% of all websites for which it can detect a server-side programming language.

Another interesting result of the survey is that “WordPress Jetpack,” the stats module in Jetpack, ranks third among the fastest growing traffic analysis tools, trailing Google Analytics and Yandex.Metrika. Jetpack Stats has been on a slow upward trend, rising from 1.6% in 2011 to 4.5% in 2017. The top fastest growing players in this category have repeated several years in a row.

It’s important to note that many Jetpack stats users also use Google Analytics, but these numbers also give a rough idea of Jetpack usage increase, since it is one of the most popular modules in the plugin. According to W3Techs, Jetpack Stats is used by 6.9% of sites for which it can detect a traffic analysis tool, which it estimates as 4.5% of all websites.