Highlights of web technology surveys, October 2011: Drupal usage has been growing to 1.7% of all websites

Posted by Matthias Gelbmann on 3 October 2011 in News, Content Management, Drupal

In the last year usage of Drupal has been growing steadily from 1.4% to 1.7% of all websites.

At the moment, every single day 9 websites within the top 1 million sites decide to start using Drupal. This is a nice achievement in the crowded area of content management systems.

Many large and famous websites use Drupal, the best known example is probably Whitehouse.gov. Other well know sites include The Economist, Examiner.com, Commission Junction, Ubuntu.com and Java.net, to name just a few.

Drupal is the most used content management system amongst .edu and .gov sites. It is also the most popular system in Belgium (where Dries Buytaert, Drupal's founder and lead developer is from), furthermore in Finland, Belarus and a few more countries.

Drupal has a CMS market share of 6.3%, and the market share amongst the top 10,000 and top 1,000 sites is even higher, at more than 10%.

Our technology change report reveals that websites change to Drupal from almost all other content management systems, with the notable exception of WordPress, where Drupal looses more sites than it gains.

Looking at other technologies used by Drupal sites, we see that almost all of them use JQuery as JavaScript library, a few use YUI, and the other libraries are almost non-existing within Drupal sites. Similarly, almost all Drupal sites use UTF-8 as character encoding, with only a few exceptions.

Although Drupal runs just fine on Windows boxes, 96.4% of webmasters decide to install it on Unix systems. Accordingly, the share of IIS as web server is very low, 87.4% of Drupal sites run on Apache.

As we all know, in the fast changing web technology area there is no guarantee for future success, but Drupal certainly looks like it will remain one of the big players in the CMS scene.

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Please note, that all trends and figures mentioned in that article are valid at the time of writing. Our surveys are updated frequently, and these trends and figures are likely to change over time.

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