3 CMS Platforms Control 73% Of The Market & Shape Technical SEO Defaults

Chris Inexperienced helped analyze 17 million web sites and co-authored the most recent search engine marketing chapter for the Net Almanac, and his conclusion ought to matter to anybody who does search engine marketing for a residing.

Inexperienced said the data showed that particular person SEOs have “minimal” web-wide affect in comparison with CMS platform defaults.

He wrote:

“If you’re actually decided to have an effect exterior of your particular purchasers … you could be nudging WordPress or Wix or Shopify.”

We’ve been tracking CMS market share at Search Engine Journal since WordPress crossed 39.5% of all web sites. Again then, the story was WordPress rising, whereas everybody else fought over scraps.

The story is completely different now, and Inexperienced’s discovering is why I wished to hint the total 10-year arc. A handful of platforms quietly took management of how many of the net handles technical search engine marketing. This text appears to be like at how that occurred and what the Net Almanac discovered when it regarded below the hood. It additionally appears to be like at what the information means for the individuals who do that work on daily basis.

How Three Platforms Took Management

In 2015, WordPress held 23.3% of all websites, Shopify had 0.3%, and Wix had 0.1%. Many of the net (61.7%) didn’t use a CMS in any respect.

By 2022, WordPress had practically doubled to 43.2% of CMS-using websites and 65.2% of market share. Then its progress stopped. WordPress fell to 43.3% of all sites and 60.7% CMS share by October 2025, a 4.5-point drop in CMS share and its first sustained contraction in over 20 years.

Whereas WordPress plateaued, three platforms grew at charges it by no means matched. Shopify rose from 0.7% to 7.2% (a 929% improve, with progress hitting 32.6% within the 12 months ending October 2025), and Squarespace climbed from 0.5% to three.4%.

Joomla and Drupal paid for it. They as soon as held roughly 14% of the CMS market mixed and now maintain lower than 3%. Joomla fell 79%, and Drupal fell 80%, each overtaken by platforms that hardly existed once they had been of their prime.

One quantity caught my consideration. In keeping with W3Techs’ yearly usage trends, 61.7% of internet sites weren’t detected utilizing any CMS that W3Techs tracks in 2015. In W3Techs information, that determine had fallen to twenty-eight.9%, that means WordPress’s share of all web sites is now bigger than the share categorized as “None.” In a few decade, the online went from largely unmanaged to largely platform-driven, and other people within the business didn’t cease to consider what meaning for who controls the technical foundations.

WordPress, Shopify, and Wix now management about 73% of all the CMS market, and all three are well-funded operations.

Shopify posted $11.56 billion in 2025 revenue, up 30% year-over-year. Wix hit $1.99 billion and posted its second consecutive 12 months of GAAP working revenue. Squarespace surpassed $1 billion in its closing 12 months as a public firm earlier than Permira acquired it for $7.2 billion in October 2024. Mixed 2025 income for Shopify and Wix alone topped $13.5 billion, and that cash funds engineering groups whose default settings govern search engine marketing for tens of millions of websites without delay.

The maths has modified, too. A decade in the past, building a website meant WordPress or Drupal, and also you wanted a developer. As we speak, AI builders generate websites in minutes, and ease of use wins for small and mid-sized companies.

The place The search engine marketing Really Occurs

Inexperienced referred to as it “maybe the most important shock” from the Net Almanac information. Platforms and their plugins drive many baseline technical search engine marketing defaults throughout a big share of the online.

In keeping with the Almanac report, canonical tag utilization has risen to 68% of desktop pages (up from 65% in 2024), and meta robots utilization grew to 47% (up from 45.5%). These positive factors monitor with CMS adoption charges, not with a wave of site-by-site optimization.

Yoast search engine marketing runs on 15.96% of all desktop web sites and accounts for practically 70% of all recognized search engine marketing device utilization. Yoast applies index,observe as its default robots directive, and the Net Almanac recorded observe directives on 64% of desktop pages and index on 69%. Each are technically pointless since engines like google default to indexing and following anyway. The more than likely clarification for his or her prevalence throughout the online is one plugin’s default setting working on tens of millions of websites no one individually configured.

Adoption of the llms.txt customary makes the purpose even sharper. The Net Almanac discovered 2.13% of websites now have a legitimate llms.txt file, which appears to be like like early adoption of a brand new customary for AI crawlers. However 39.6% of these recordsdata had been auto-generated by All in One search engine marketing as a default function, and one other 3.6% got here from Yoast. The Net Almanac Notes it might probably’t make certain this “is at all times a aware act or endorsement of the llms.txt customary.”

Most of what appears to be like like intentional adoption is a plugin working on autopilot. We lined this discovering when Green’s article published, and it caught with me as a result of it reveals precisely how invisible the platform hand is. In lots of instances, adoption seems to return from plugin defaults relatively than an express resolution. A checkbox in a settings panel can allow it.

Structured information follows the identical sample. Homepages obtain handbook consideration with constant JSON-LD markup, whereas interior pages run on CMS templates the place the platform dynamically handles structured information. That template-driven course of typically duplicates homepage-specific schema onto interior pages the place it doesn’t belong.

Picture optimization is analogous. Deliberate lazy loading utilizing loading="lazy" clusters amongst websites the place builders actively added it, whereas 68% of photos throughout the online depend on browser defaults. Most websites by no means made a alternative about picture loading, and their platform made it for them.

Robots.txt validity has improved to 85% of recordsdata returning a legitimate 200 standing, pushed by CMS platforms producing legitimate recordsdata by default. However the precise contents are overwhelmingly the wildcard catch-all. A legitimate file exists, and no one configured what it says.

Wix reveals how far platform-level search engine marketing can go. In keeping with Wix’s SEO settings documentation, the platform routinely creates Native Enterprise structured information markup for a web site’s homepage when a enterprise title and placement are added, and the person doesn’t must know what structured information is. Examine that to WordPress, the place many web site house owners by no means add structured information in any respect with out express steerage or a plugin they discovered on their very own.

No platform publishes information on what number of customers override these defaults. A 3rd-party scan of 21,327 Squarespace homepages by SEOSpace turned up a median search engine marketing rating of 40.5 out of 100, with 66.4% lacking alt textual content and 47% working a number of H1 tags. If these numbers are consultant, the platforms’ default settings are the entire recreation for many websites.

Inexperienced didn’t hedge, writing:

“Plenty of SEOs consider that Google owes us as a result of we keep the web for them … I additionally don’t suppose we have now as a lot affect maybe at an business degree as perhaps some prefer to consider.”

The Efficiency Paradox

The Core Net Vitals numbers add a component that’s laborious to elucidate when you suppose higher defaults equal higher rankings.

WordPress has the lowest CWV pass rate of any platform at 45% on cellular, whereas Duda leads at 85% and Wix hits 75% after gaining 14 proportion factors year-over-year. Wix additionally scores an ideal 100 on Lighthouse search engine marketing, the one platform to try this two years working. WordPress scores 92.

And but a Rankability analysis of 59,000 prime‑rating domains discovered that WordPress accounts for 49% of the websites utilizing a CMS, making it the dominant platform amongst prime‑rating domains. Wix and Shopify are practically absent from the highest 10,000 websites by site visitors, whereas Drupal, with lower than 1% total CMS share, holds 6-7% among the many highest-traffic websites.

We’ve been watching this develop throughout a number of years of CMS market share reporting. Prime WordPress websites put money into premium internet hosting and cautious optimization and carry out properly, whereas common WordPress websites run on shared internet hosting with unoptimized plugins and drag the platform common down. Half fail CWV because of poor server response instances alone.

Managed platforms produce extra constant outcomes as a result of they management all the stack. The Net Almanac concluded that “platforms with extra tightly managed environments see the biggest positive factors.” Wix and Duda don’t permit the variability that creates WordPress’s lengthy tail.

Shopify complicates this additional. Regardless of being an ecommerce platform, historically the heaviest class for efficiency, it achieves a 77.95% good CWV rate. However Shopify has structural search engine marketing limits that no quantity of default optimization can repair, together with obligatory URL prefixes (/merchandise/, /collections/, /pages/), duplicate content material from collection-path URLs, and a 100,000 redirect restrict that requires human experience to navigate.

Platform defaults set the ground and the typical, and experience units the ceiling. That hole is the place consulting nonetheless earns its preserve.

WordPress At A Crossroads

In keeping with W3Techs information, WordPress’s contraction began in 2022 because of market saturation and rising competitors. Then, the WP Engine dispute in September 2024 added a governance disaster on prime of it.

Matt Mullenweg called WP Engine “a cancer to WordPress” in a September 2024 weblog publish. Days later, Mullenweg wrote that “WP Engine now not has free entry to WordPress.org’s sources.” Search Engine Journal reported the change blocked many WP Engine prospects from updating or putting in plugins and themes.

In October 2024, Automattic seized WP Engine’s Superior Customized Fields plugin, the primary compelled takeover in WordPress’s 21-year historical past. WP Engine sued, and a court docket granted a preliminary injunction in December 2024. Litigation continues into 2026.

BlackRock marked down its Automattic shares by a cumulative 63.5% in response to The Repository’s reporting on fund filings. Automattic misplaced 159 employees through a voluntary “alignment offer” in October 2024 and cut roughly 16% of its remaining workforce in April 2025. Improvement took the most important hit. The Verge reported that in January 2025, Automattic minimize its open-source contribution hours from roughly 3,988 per week to 45. The Repository noted that Automattic had traditionally been the biggest contributor to the WordPress venture.

Five for the Future updates from May 2024 confirmed Automattic-sponsored hours made up about half of tracked sponsored contributions. WordPress shipped two main releases in 2025 as a substitute of the standard three, and the proposed 2026 schedule targets a return to 3.

Between December 2024 and December 2025, WordPress contracted 2.9% whereas Wix grew 22.4% and Squarespace grew 6.2% in market share. No mass exodus, as a result of switching prices are too excessive. However the dispute uncovered a focus danger. When 43% of the online is determined by a platform whose growth tempo might be minimize by one firm’s selections, that’s a danger most practitioners haven’t priced in.

Joost de Valk, Yoast search engine marketing’s founder, was removed from the speaker lineup at WordCamp Asia 2025 after Mullenweg declared him “persona non grata.” De Valk had called for governance changes that would cut back Mullenweg’s unilateral management over the venture, and twenty veteran core committers signed an open letter calling for “community-minded” governance. Mullenweg partially reversed course in mid-2025 by lifting bans and resuming contributions, however group belief hasn’t recovered.

That dispute didn’t trigger the market decline, which began two years earlier. Nevertheless it made clear what occurs when management over 43% of the online’s platform layer sits in too few arms, and for anybody advising purchasers on platform selections, that’s price factoring in.

What This Means For Practitioners

For tens of millions of websites on managed platforms, baseline technical search engine marketing is dealt with on the platform degree now. When Wix ships an enchancment, it touches tens of millions of dwell websites without delay. Particular person consultants work at a special scale completely.

What we’re seeing within the information and in our protection is that the highest-value work is shifting towards the perimeters. Migration consulting is high-risk and high-value as a result of Shopify’s 100,000 redirect restrict alone creates demand, and sophisticated CMS migrations carry actual site visitors danger.

Auditing platform defaults matter extra now, too. Realizing what Wix does out of the field versus what Shopify leaves to the person is platform-specific data that earns its worth when a consumer is selecting between them or migrating from one to the opposite.

The Squarespace scan turned up a 40.5/100 common search engine marketing rating throughout 21,000+ websites. Even on platforms with first rate defaults, there’s optimization work to do.

AI visibility is the latest layer. GPTBot mentions in robots.txt grew 55% year-over-year in response to the Net Almanac, and ClaudeBot practically doubled. Inexperienced warned that companies chopping bot crawling to save lots of server prices “may desperately affect your AI visibility.” Balancing crawl finances, AI coaching publicity, and AI search visibility is a name platforms can’t make for his or her customers. Practitioners nonetheless personal that one.

Trying Forward

Once I began overlaying CMS market share at Search Engine Journal, the story was WordPress dominance and a fragmented discipline of small gamers. Ten years later, three platforms management 73% of the CMS market, and their engineering groups set the technical search engine marketing defaults for many of the net.

Particular person search engine marketing professionals nonetheless matter on the web site degree. However engineering groups at a handful of corporations now maintain extra mixed sway over technical search engine marketing than the consulting world does by itself. Whether or not the business has caught up with that actuality is the unanswered query.

Inexperienced’s closing line from his Net Almanac evaluation bears repeating. “If you’re actually decided to have an effect,” he wrote, “you could be nudging WordPress or Wix or Shopify.”

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