I’ve been working in content management and marketing for over a decade, and in that time have seen plenty of trends around how organisations choose and use their website platform.
But what do the trends in 2024 tell you about how you’ll manage your website content in the future?
The truth is, there is a mass exodus.
All of the signs point to a move away from the once ‘titan’ enterprise platforms of the past, and towards a different, more flexible, and easier to wrangle model.
So what does this mean for you?
If you’re in marketing and creating content, or you’re a techie interested in how your organisation uses your CMS, then these trends should prick your ears up.
We’ve written this to help look at the decline of certain platforms, some of the reasons why, and the choices that other marketers and technologists are making for their new CMS.
Moving to more flexible platforms like WordPress, and away from the titans of the past, could be the exact thing that empowers your marketing and IT infrastructure long into the future.
Let’s take a look at why…
Why Brands Are Leaving Their CMSes Behind
There are a lot of reasons why brands (and marketers like you) are leaving their current CMS behind. And, I’ll get into the why of each specific platform later.
But it’s hard to look at the trends of the last 18-24 months and not feel like this is more than just a coincidence. You don’t see multiple graphs with a drop like this, without their being a much larger explanation:
And the biggest cause of this change is, well…you!
Let me explain…
Marketers used to inherit a CMS from their IT department or a previous regime. Someone, somewhere, decided it was the right thing to use so it’s what you used. You were stuck with it and you probably didn’t have much of a say.
It makes sense because safety and security were at the heart of those decisions. But, over the last few years, something changed.
Decisions around websites became more about content. And, marketers like you and me are the people who make decisions on content. Marketing teams now need to be able to:
- Build website pages at scale
- Publish high-quality content regularly
- Maintain brand consistency
- Capture leads and queries on more than just ‘contact form’
The advent of Content Marketing changed the game. And those complex platforms, like Drupal and Sitecore, aren’t built for content marketing agility and SEO the way that a CMS like WordPress is. What was once a ‘blogging platform’ is the modern-day marketers’ secret weapon.
Combine that with the fact that many platforms, like Umbraco and Drupal, have an in-built end-of-life that means you need to migrate your entire site every few years, and those open-source platforms that stay consistent look an awful lot more attractive.
Not to mention that you’re being asked to do a lot more, with an awful lot less, and the $50,000 spent on a CMS licence alone could be better spent elsewhere.
If you’re not one of the marketers currently jumping ship, you can probably see why so many of your peers are already. But what does this mean for you, and how does it impact your CMS?
In the links below you’ll find a breakdown of the main CMS platforms and why, specifically, people are leaving your platform behind – and how to answer the age-old question asked by The Clash: should I stay or should I go?
How The Great CMS Exodus Impacts Your CMS
Since this report is pretty epic, we’ve created some handy links to help you jump straight to your current CMS:
- Adobe Commerce (formerly Magento)
- Adobe Experience Manager
- Contentful
- Craft CMS
- Drupal
- ExpressionEngine
- HubSpot
- Joomla!
- Next.js (in conjunction with a CMS)
- Optimizely (formerly Episerver)
- Shopify
- Sitecore
- Webflow
- WordPress
- WooCommerce
Which CMS platforms are on the decline?
Now, I bet you’re quite keen to know which of the popular content management platforms, that previously dominated (at least a section of) the enterprise landscape, are now on the decline.
Before we dive in, it’s worth noting that we haven’t covered every CMS platform here, just the ones most relevant to enterprise and mid-market organisations. And whilst the usage stats are indeed factual (courtesy of BuiltWith) we’ve also added in some predictions on why these changes are taking place for each platform.
Here goes…
Drupal
Drupal is one of the OGs of the content management space, and rightly deserved the growth it experienced from its inception. Favoured by the technically-minded decision makers for its developer-friendly approach and open source licensing, Drupal’s market share and usage continued to grow right up to 2020, before it started to experience some decline.
A mixture of brands favouring more user-friendly content management, a requirement for faster time-to-market, and several Drupal versions reaching end of life have resulted in its recent decline.
It’s worth pointing out that we might be about to see a more dramatic decline for Drupal. Version 7, its most-used version, is reaching end of life in January 2025. Its latest versions, 10 and 11, have less than half the amount of instals combined when compared to their popular version 7 predecessor.
Why? Because it’s not as simple as hitting an ‘update software’ button and everything will be okay. Moving from Drupal 7 to Drupal 10 or 11 requires a full rebuild, which has led many brands to adopt other platforms.
This means there are interesting times ahead for this once mighty CMS.
Link: https://trends.builtwith.com/cms/Drupal
Sitecore
When conducting our research, Sitecore was so far down the list of the most popular CMS platforms we almost missed it. But putting the cat claws away, let’s look at how this once top choice for enterprise websites is now fairing!
BuiltWith now ranks it as the 14th most popular CMS in the ‘enterprise’ category, which was certainly a higher figure in 2019 when it rose to peak popularity.
Sitecore managed to find significant growth and success between 2006 and 2017, before beginning its decline more recently in 2022.
Noting that Sitecore carries with it pretty hefty licence fees, it’s highly likely that brands have begun to favour spending their budgets on features they really need, rather than features that come with the price tag (and then remain mostly unused).
However, it looks to have lost most users to Adobe Experience Manager and Optimizely, which wouldn’t necessarily support the pricing argument.
Finding enough agencies or developers that specialise in Sitecore is an increasingly difficult task though. We’ve observed agencies once fully dedicated to Sitecore now diversifying to platforms like Drupal and WordPress. This lack of specialist resources creates risk for organisations, and is likely another reason they’ve been moving away from the platform in recent years.
Link: https://trends.builtwith.com/cms/Sitecore-CMS
Adobe Commerce (formerly Magento)
Formerly known as Magento, and purchased by Adobe, Adobe Commerce is an eCommerce CMS system that grew in popularity until 2020. Today it’s still one of the 20 most popular eCommerce platforms on the internet, but since 2021 has been experiencing a steady decline.
It could be argued that Adobe isn’t quite steering the ship since it was acquired, but we won’t go there!
Similar to platforms like WordPress, Adobe Commerce gets regular updates rather than major versions, so won’t be suffering its decline due to a major end-of-life version. This means there are other factors at play, which are likely to be the cost, and the idea of buying into a commercial entity rather than licence-free open source platforms like WordPress.
Speaking of which, Adobe Commerce is losing a significant amount of users to WooCommerce, as well as PrestaShop and OpenCart.
Link: https://trends.builtwith.com/shop/Magento
Joomla!
Back in the early 2010s Joomla! was an incredibly popular CMS solution, in fact the 2nd most popular CMS for most developers building a new website for their customers. In more recent years it has been fading into the backdrop as now the 10th most popular CMS on the internet.
In 2016, the Joomla! community began discussing ‘The Fall of Joomla’ and cited the rising popularity of WordPress as the number one reason for its decline. Some of this was due to marketers favouring WordPress over Joomla! for its more user-friendly content publishing tools.
For developers, the Joomla! release cycle (a new major version roughly every two years) can be fairly discouraging in itself. Spending a long time developing new features only for a new version to be released shortly after, requiring further development, sounds like enough to rip your hair out.
Link: https://trends.builtwith.com/cms/Joomla!
ExpressionEngine
ExpressionEngine’s own marketing describes themselves as “The Best Open Source CMS,” but it seems their users don’t quite agree!
Once growing in steady popularity amongst enterprise organisations, it has been experiencing an even steadier decline since 2018. Another of the CMS platforms that claims to be ‘open source’ but, unlike Drupal or WordPress, is a commercial money-making entity. This could well be one of the reasons for their decline in popularity.
Much of its once-increasing user base is reported to have been moving to the newer, more trendy Craft CMS, which shares a lot of similarities with ExpressionEngine.
Whilst ExpressionEngine has a decent sized community of developers and enthusiasts, the official website lists only 18 agencies globally who they consider to be proficient in developing using the CMS. That’s a heck of a risk if your brand’s credibility relies on such scarcely available expertise.
Link: https://trends.builtwith.com/cms/ExpressionEngine
Optimizely CMS (formerly EPiServer)
Whilst this is a super-niche example of an enterprise CMS, I did promise that I’d explain where some of the previous users of other platforms were once gravitating to, and it seems Optimizely CMS, formerly EPiServer, had been taking a little bit of that market share.
Having started out life as EPiServer before acquiring Optimizely in 2020, the product was a composable CMS platform similar to a lot of the other commercialised models we’ve looked at in this article. Joining forces with Optimizely, a performance marketing platform, has no doubt given rise to a lot of the growth experienced by the unified brand up until now.
For marketers looking for a platform that can drive performance marketing whilst creating website content, Optimizely CMS seems like a really sensible option. However, for their full stack of software you can be talking about licence costs of over $200k per year.
And… the higher your traffic, the more you pay. Ouch!
Whilst the trend across the top one million websites is small and fairly recent, the data across the entire internet nods towards a more serious decline. This seems to coincide with the acquisition in 2020 I mentioned above.
Link: https://trends.builtwith.com/cms/EPiServer
Where are brands going for their CMS instead?
Now that we’ve looked at the mass exodus of users from platforms that were once titans of the CMS enterprise space, which platforms are organisations moving their websites to, and why?
Whilst it’d be a mighty task to list all of the platforms that brands have been gravitating to, we’ve picked out the top platforms that most organisations seem to have been favouring across the last few years (and continue to do so).
Let’s dive in…
Shopify
Once thought of as the startup breeding ground for online stores before successful sellers found a more serious eCommerce platform to grow upon, Shopify has done a great job of doing commercial deals, promoting their customer’s stores and growing with their requirements.
Whilst it’s still not an entirely flexible platform with some drawbacks such as scalability and choice of payment provider, Shopify has created a number of really good success stories with its customers who’ve grown from just hundreds in revenue up to the multi-millions.
Where Shopify has done particularly well is in mopping up a lot of users from the niche eCommerce platforms, since it’s seen as a more straightforward, DIY, all-in-one option, including its nature as a fully hosted solution.
It’s exciting to see the continued growth of a platform that’s making it easy for new entrepreneurs to launch their own stores and product lines.
Unsurprisingly, it’s now the number one eCommerce platform on the internet and the 3rd most popular ‘hosted solution’. These hosted platforms, in other words an ‘all-in-one’ solution, are often favoured by small businesses for the low barrier of entry and quick setup.
Link: https://trends.builtwith.com/shop/Shopify
WordPress
Considering it started out in the world of small personal blogs, WordPress has come a heck of a long way in 20 years. Likely succeeding as a result of its true open source nature, its free licensing, and a community of thousands of developers dedicated to its continual development.
More recently WordPress has proven its worth in the enterprise space, and continues to grow in popularity amongst the top 100,000 and top 10,000 websites by traffic. It is, in fact, the number one most used website amongst:
- the top 1 million websites;
- the top 100,000 websites;
- the top 10,000 websites; and
- the entire internet.
There are a few reasons why enterprise organisations have been choosing WordPress, including: its flexible codebase, straightforward content management, speedy time to market, and ability to use it for small campaigns and microsites before implementing it as a brand’s primary CMS.
WordPress doesn’t really do end of life for products (except the editor, which is about the only end of life thing WP has done in 20 years) so has become the best choice for organisations and developers alike fed up of being forced to do a major upgrade every few years, an inherent problem we’ve already explained that plagues Drupal, Umbraco, Sitecore, AEM, ExpressionEngine, Adobe Commerce, Joomla and plenty of other CMS platforms.
Marketing managers and developers alike continue to turn to WordPress for their next CMS move due to user-friendly content management, shallow learning curves, and faster deployment times.
Link: https://trends.builtwith.com/cms/WordPress
WooCommerce
A similar story to the success found by Shopify in the world of online stores, WooCommerce has also grown up from its perception as a small store platform with a DIY approach, to a platform that can underpin real scalability and eCommerce growth.
Whilst it’s built upon WordPress, WooCommerce deserves an entire category of its own for its breadth of eCommerce capabilities, and in itself is the 2nd most used eCommerce solution globally.
WooCommerce, much like its foundation in WordPress, is a truly flexible and scalable solution. With easy product and content management for shop owners, alongside a flexible infrastructure and enjoyable codebase for developers, it’s no wonder WooCommerce has grown in popularity, and continues to do so.
Whilst the figures for the top 1 million websites by traffic according to BuiltWith shows a slight dip in 2024, the figures for the ‘entire internet’ category show a significant and continual increase.
Link: https://trends.builtwith.com/shop/WooCommerce
Adobe Experience Manager
The trend that surprised me the most on this list is Adobe Experience Manager. Whilst it ranks only 14th in the top 100k content managed websites by traffic, it has experienced continued adoption since 2015.
The “buying IBM” of content management for enterprise, Adobe Experience Manager is easily the most expensive platform on our list of trending content management systems. And this is the reason I’m most surprised, with some enterprise organisations paying into the hundreds of thousands, or even millions, just to publish some forms. However, they’re clearly doing something right to build relationships with enterprise consultancies who promote the platform to their clients.
Aside from their brand recognition, one of most likely reasons for Adobe’s success in CMS is down to their approach to asset management – especially if your media library is in the tens or hundreds of thousands of assets – something that most CMS platforms haven’t done enough to solve natively.
Link: https://trends.builtwith.com/cms/Adobe-Experience-Manager
Webflow
What’s certainly no surprise, is the gravitation of smaller businesses and non-enterprise organisations across to Webflow. Promoted as a no-code solution, Webflow is built for designers and is ideal for allowing them to be quick, free, and creative non-fussy in their approach to creating websites.
There are some considerable drawbacks to Webflow, most related to its flexibility, poor SEO, and its nature as a commercial entity, which are likely reasons they’re losing market share back to the likes of WordPress (from which they once took it). That said, if you were once a designer considering Craft CMS (more on that below), you may well have diverted your attention to Webflow as an easier, arguably sexier solution.
It’s nowhere near ideal for enterprise businesses, or those looking to really optimise for SEO, but it’s a quick-to-deploy solution that’s ranked the 14th most popular CMS across the entire internet.
Link: https://trends.builtwith.com/cms/Webflow
Another direction for your CMS: headless
Not a CMS in itself, but certainly a viable approach to using content management systems, is to implement one as part of a headless infrastructure. Headless is a technical approach that sees the content management platform separated from the front-end user interface, benefiting in increased performance and security for some website scenarios.
Headless has been growing in popularity in recent years, and has become somewhat of a buzzword for marketers, developers, and the industry as a whole. It’s not always the most ideal solution, and requires specialist development expertise, but we’ve covered that in our article about headless: what is it and do you need it?
We could’ve gone into extreme detail about headless here, but instead have picked out a couple of noteworthy CMS platforms and frameworks, and the trends that go with them.
Contentful
Finding itself as one of the go-to platforms for headless CMS, Contentful has experienced brilliant success, particularly since 2022. It isn’t open source, but it is built specifically for enterprise (and therefore isn’t cheap!).
As a content management system, Contentful users benefit from a flexible and modular approach, and if you were looking for a pure-breed headless CMS (since it’s now the buzzword that it is) then you may well be seriously considering Contentful as your go-to CMS.
After growing quite steadily for almost two decades, it does seem to have reached a plateau towards the end of 2023. One to watch!
Link: https://trends.builtwith.com/cms/Contentful
Next.js
Arguably the most suitable front-end framework for building headless websites (based on our own development team’s experience and research) Next.js is based on the React framework and has continued to experience considerable adoption since 2021.
Being used for progressive web applications and headless sites, it makes a great pairing with the most well adopted headless CMS platforms like WordPress, Shopify, and Contentful.
Link: https://trends.builtwith.com/framework/Next.js
Other CMS platforms of note
There are just a couple of other platforms worth a separate mention, that don’t quite fit in the enterprise CMS category, but worth knowing a little more about their usage and trends.
Let’s take a look at our honorary mentions…
Craft
You would probably have selected this platform if a branding or design agency had recommended it, or included it as part of a wider re-branding project. It was gaining in popularity until 2022, and began shrinking again more recently.
The most likely reason for this is its relatively low adoption across the market, meaning there’s a lack of web agencies and developers able or willing to continue supporting it. A big consideration when making any platform selection.
Link: https://trends.builtwith.com/cms/Craft
HubSpot COS
HubSpot is a really interesting one, and a relatively new entrant to the CMS/COS (content optimisation system) market.
We use HubSpot at Illustrate Digital to manage our sales process and some of our marketing. Knowing what we know about the web, and the importance of flexibility, agility and scalability, we’re definitely not going to choose it as our content management platform.
But likely the very reason that most people have adopted it as a CMS is because they’re already using HubSpot in one way or another. It’s relatively easy to adopt, but almost impossibly difficult to customise well. And good luck finding a large enough number of true specialists in the HubSpot COS to make it a strong business decision.
That said… if you want to try something out, test a campaign, create a quick landing page, it’s probably worth a shot before moving to something more adaptable long term.
All of this created some nice growth for HubSpot COS in recent years, and a lot of this will be in its use as a complimentary CMS, not the primary choice for most brands. However, we suspect we’ll see a u-turn on this at some point in the coming years.
Let’s see!
Link: https://trends.builtwith.com/cms/HubSpot-COS
How to choose your next CMS platform
Now you’ve been supplied with a wealth of information on the latest CMS trends, you may well be wondering what your next move should be.
The CMS you choose really does depend on your organisation’s priorities.
Questions to help you decide
There are a few questions we might ask, which may also frame things up for other senior stakeholders in your organisation:
What do the trends tell us about the future?
You’re a decision maker who likes to future-proof their work, so choosing a CMS that’s still on the up will be a less risky call than a CMS your peers are all migrating away from. Choosing WordPress, Adobe Experience Manager or Optimizely for enterprise are all options that should help you future-proof your decisions.
What budget do you have available to build, rebuild or improve your CMS?
If your budget is relatively small and scrappy, then you might be best suited to a hosted CMS solution in the meantime. This could be Shopify, Webflow or some iterations of WordPress and WooCommerce.
If you have a healthy or even generous budget, then one of the CMS platforms on the rise will serve you well. Again WordPress, Adobe Experience Manager or Optimizely are all viable enterprise solutions. WordPress is the open source option, AEM and Optimizely are commercial, locked-in solutions.
How quickly do you need to go to market, or is there a reasonable timeline to plan, build and deploy?
Amongst enterprise options, WordPress makes for an easier choice for those looking to get something out there without significant development cycles. If time is no barrier then AEM, Optimizely or a Next.js setup are all good cards to have on the decision table.
Are you testing something out like a marketing campaign or idea, or is your website the main event for your marketing?
If you’re in a position to be a little more scrappy, daring and try out your next big idea before committing significant development time, then there are some good quick-to-launch options in the CMS market. HubSpot is closely interwoven with their marketing tools, WordPress is flexible and adaptable enough to design and develop something quickly (or even utilise a theme if you’re willing to be extra quick), and both Shopify and WooCommerce will allow you to spin up a site using a theme pretty quickly if you’re looking to test out a new eCommerce store.
Our recommendation
You might also be wondering what we’d recommend…
We’re very big fans of WordPress. And yes, its usefulness and flexibility as an enterprise CMS.
With WordPress we’re talking truly open source, free licensing, and a community of global developers dedicated to its continual growth.
You’re a proof-conscious decision maker, so the stats and trends shared in the WordPress section of this post show that it’s continuing to grow in popularity amongst the top 10,000 and top 1,000 websites by traffic. It is, in fact, the number one most used CMS for:
- the top 1 million websites;
- the top 100,000 websites;
- the top 10,000 websites; and
- the entire internet.
Why WordPress for enterprise?
There are a few good reasons why enterprise organisations have been choosing WordPress, including:
- its flexible codebase;
- straightforward content management;
- speedy time to market; and
- ability to use it for small campaigns and microsites before implementing it as a brand’s primary CMS.
Also, and this is really important…
WordPress doesn’t do major version upgrades or devastating ‘end of life’ events for its software for products.
It has become the best choice for organisations fed up of being forced to do a major upgrade every few years, which is an inherent problem that plagues Drupal, Umbraco, Sitecore, AEM, ExpressionEngine, Magento, Joomla and plenty of other CMS platforms.
We’re here to help
If you’d like to talk about choosing your next CMS platform or planning your next website project, our subject matter experts at Illustrate Digital are here to help.
You can explore more about our WordPress development services, uncover what it’s like to work with us, or reach out to us for a conversation.
