Mediaboss Marketing

March 05, 2014, 6:00 AM Drupal, the popular open source content management system (CMS), now officially powers more than 1 million websites. According to data from BuiltWith Research, it topped that number for the first time in February. BuiltWith data also finds that Drupal is now the engine behind 12% of the web's top 100,000 most-trafficked websites.

[SEE ALSO: Drupal founder Dries Buytaert talks about Drupal 8 development]

Those are great numbers for Drupal, which recently celebrated its 13th birthday. Looking at more of the BuiltWith data, though, we see that Drupal still has quite a ways to go to catch up to WordPress, the leading content management system, which powers 43.7% of the top 100,000 websites.

The numbers are similar when looking at the top 10,000 sites, with WordPress powering 43.2% of those sites and Drupal 14.1%. If we expand to the top 1 million websites, WordPress now jumps to 51.5% followed then Joomla, another open source CMS, with 8.2% and then Drupal at 6.6%.

W3Techs provides data on CMS usage for an even larger sample, the top 10 million web sites (based on Alexa rankings). For that population, WordPress has 21.4% of sites, followed again by Joomla with 3.1% and Drupal at 1.9%.

It's not surprising that WordPress leads the pack here, because of its ease of use. Given the trends over time, it doesn't appear that Drupal will catch WordPress anytime soon. So, for now and the foreseeable future, WordPress is king of the CMS world.

It's also not surprising that, once we look at a large enough sample of sites, Joomla use surpasses Drupal, given Drupal's reputation for having a higher learning curve. But once we're looking at larger, more well trafficked sites, Drupal gains traction due to its functionality and extensibility.

In any case, 1 million websites is an impressive feat, so "Gefeliciteerd!" (I think that's "Congratulations" in Dutch) to the whole Drupal team!

Read more of Phil Johnson's #Tech blog and follow the latest IT news at ITworld. Follow Phil on Twitter at @itwphiljohnson. For the latest IT news, analysis and how-tos, follow ITworld on Twitter and Facebook.

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Not a drop in the bucket: More than 1 million websites now use Drupal