CMS Market Share by Vertical: Ecommerce, Store Categories and the Wider Web
W3Techs tracks CMS market share across the whole web; Store Leads tracks every platform behind 13.7 million live online stores, broken down by the industry each store sells in. We put the two side by side — with W3Techs’ trend data back to 2015 and Store Leads’ store counts back to 2019.
📋 What’s in this page
Key CMS Market Share Statistics
The picture changes substantially depending on whether you’re looking at the whole web or one vertical at a time — the platform that wins “all websites” isn’t always the platform that wins a specific category.
W3Techs’ survey — the most-cited CMS market share source on the web — measures every website it crawls as one pool. It doesn’t ask whether a site is a blog, a company site or an online store. Store Leads takes the opposite approach: it tracks only online stores, but classifies each one by the industry it sells in. Neither covers the other’s ground, so this page shows both datasets side by side rather than mixing them into a single number.
CMS Share Across All Websites
This is the number most commonly cited, and it’s dominated by content-first sites — blogs, brochure sites, news and informational pages — simply because they make up the bulk of the web.
| Platform | Share of All Websites | CMS Market Share |
|---|---|---|
| WordPress | 40.1% | 58.6% |
| Shopify | 5.4% | 7.8% |
| Wix | 4.2% | 6.1% |
| Squarespace | 2.4% | 3.6% |
| Joomla | 1.1% | 1.6% |
| Tilda | 0.8% | 1.2% |
| Webflow | 0.8% | 1.2% |
| Duda | 0.7% | 1.1% |
| Drupal | 0.6% | 0.9% |
| No detected CMS | 31.6% | — |
Source: W3Techs, 8 October 2026. “CMS Market Share” is the platform’s share among sites whose CMS W3Techs can identify; “Share of All Websites” includes the 31.6% with no detected CMS. W3Techs also reports that 19.8% of WordPress sites use WooCommerce.
CMS platform share of all websites
WordPress dominates by a wide margin.
Source: W3Techs, 8 October 2026.Free to reuse with attribution and a link to paidhosting.com
WordPress and Its Rivals, 2015–2026
WordPress grew almost every year for a decade, reached its highest yearly reading — 43.6% of all websites — in January 2025, and has since slipped — W3Techs’ October 2026 reading is 40.1%, while the share of sites with no detected CMS rose from 28.6% to 31.6% over the same months. Hosted builders kept gaining, and the older open-source CMS platforms kept shrinking.
WordPress share of all websites
Share of all websites using WordPress on 1 January of each year, plus the latest reading.
Source: W3Techs, historical yearly trends in the usage of content management systems.Free to reuse with attribution and a link to paidhosting.com
| Share of all websites | 2015 | 2020 | 2025 | Oct 2026 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| WordPress | 23.3% | 35.4% | 43.6% | 40.1% |
| Shopify | 0.3% | 1.9% | 4.7% | 5.4% |
| Wix | 0.1% | 1.3% | 3.3% | 4.2% |
| Squarespace | 0.2% | 1.5% | 2.2% | 2.4% |
| Joomla | 3.3% | 2.6% | 1.6% | 1.1% |
| Drupal | 2.0% | 1.7% | 0.9% | 0.6% |
| No detected CMS | 61.7% | 43.1% | 29.6% | 31.6% |
Source: W3Techs, historical yearly trends (1 January of each year; latest reading 8 October 2026).
Popular Sites vs. the Whole Web
Market share also shifts with how much traffic a site gets. Shopify’s share of the top 1 million websites is 15.8%, against 7.8% across the web overall, while WordPress holds a lower — but still dominant — share among the most-visited sites.
| CMS market share | All sites | Top 1M | Top 100K | Top 10K | Top 1K |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| WordPress | 58.6% | 48.5% | 50.9% | 51.2% | 50.4% |
| Shopify | 7.8% | 15.8% | 8.5% | 4.0% | 4.9% |
Source: W3Techs, WordPress and Shopify usage broken down by ranking, 8 October 2026. Shares are among sites whose CMS W3Techs can identify.
Ecommerce Platforms by Live Stores
The moment you isolate online stores, the ranking changes. WooCommerce — a WordPress plugin, not a standalone CMS — runs the most live stores, but Shopify is growing while WooCommerce shrinks, and the gap between them has narrowed since 2024.
| Platform | Live Stores | Year-over-Year (Q3 2026) |
|---|---|---|
| WooCommerce | 3,998,457 | −10% |
| Shopify | 3,103,755 | +15% |
| Custom cart | 1,693,947 | — |
| Wix | 966,810 | −3% |
| Squarespace | 392,467 | +9% |
| Square Online | 302,410 | — |
| GoDaddy Online Store | 251,725 | — |
Source: Store Leads, The State of Ecommerce in 2026 and individual platform reports, updated 2 October 2026 — 13,760,654 live stores tracked across 100 ecommerce platforms. Year-over-year changes are as Store Leads reports them for each platform.
| Active stores | WooCommerce | Shopify |
|---|---|---|
| 2020 Q4 | 1,770,544 | 1,423,278 |
| 2021 Q4 | 3,207,564 | 1,658,668 |
| 2022 Q4 | 3,902,868 | 1,988,183 |
| 2023 Q4 | 4,573,529 | 2,294,041 |
| 2024 Q4 | 4,748,170 | 2,420,142 |
| 2025 Q4 | 4,467,654 | 2,859,828 |
| 2026 Q3 | 4,050,284 | 3,108,808 |
Source: Store Leads, State of WooCommerce in 2026 and State of Shopify in 2026 (active stores by quarter, based on historical store counts).
Ecommerce Platforms by Industry Vertical
Store Leads classifies every store by the industry it sells in, which gives the clearest view of how platform choice changes by vertical. Shopify has the most stores in apparel, beauty, toys, pets and gifts; WooCommerce leads in most other categories, by the widest margins in business & industrial, education and travel; Wix and Squarespace stores lean toward arts & entertainment and people & society sellers.
| Category | WooCommerce | Shopify | Wix | Squarespace |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Apparel | 340,029 | 836,839 | 84,308 | 28,848 |
| Home & Garden | 457,806 | 384,192 | 84,007 | 27,603 |
| Beauty & Fitness | 225,028 | 341,100 | 89,047 | 31,550 |
| Food & Drink | 293,861 | 216,547 | 69,450 | 33,023 |
| Business & Industrial | 310,154 | 70,171 | 48,314 | 14,299 |
| People & Society | 231,338 | 120,534 | 95,727 | 41,651 |
| Health | 218,496 | 144,102 | 48,471 | 17,718 |
| Arts & Entertainment | 174,423 | 107,432 | 101,846 | 63,613 |
| Jobs & Education | 153,839 | 20,379 | 34,411 | 11,421 |
| Travel | 118,203 | 21,152 | 19,317 | 6,452 |
Live stores per category on each platform. Source: Store Leads platform reports, updated 2 October 2026. Highlighted cells mark the platform with the most stores in each category among these four.
Sources & Methodology
All-website CMS figures, the 2015–2026 trend and the breakdown by traffic ranking come from W3Techs’ ongoing web technology survey (readings dated 8 October 2026 unless noted). Ecommerce platform counts, growth and industry categories come from Store Leads’ database of live online stores (updated 2 October 2026). Because the two datasets measure different things — all websites versus online stores only — their figures are shown side by side, not combined. Both services update continuously, so the exact numbers drift over time; each figure is dated to the reading it came from, and this page is re-checked against the current data periodically.
- W3Techs — Usage Statistics and Market Share of Content Management Systems; historical yearly trends; WordPress and Shopify breakdowns by ranking (October 2026)
- Store Leads — The State of Ecommerce in 2026; State of WooCommerce, Shopify, Wix and Squarespace in 2026 (updated 2 October 2026)
Cite this analysis
https://www.paidhosting.com/cms-market-share-by-vertical/
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