What Is a CMS? The World's 10 Most Popular Systems
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Statista published a list in March 2024 of “the most widely used off the shelf CMS software in the world”, ranked by share. If you want to use something other than WordPress on the site you are about to build, this piece is exactly for you. Let us go through the world’s most widely used CMS platforms together.
In this opening I should say that WordPress is a very capable piece of software. There are still cases where it does not fit your project. For those cases, here are the 10 most widely used alternatives.
What Is a CMS?
What the letters stand for: Content Management System (CMS)
A CMS is a digital application used to manage content, one that lets several contributors create, edit and publish it. Content in a CMS is usually stored in a database and displayed on a presentation layer built from a set of templates, such as a website.
These are the functions a CMS has in common:
Content creation, letting users create and edit content easily
Content storage, keeping content consistently in one place
Workflows, assigning permissions for managing content by role, such as author, editor and administrator
Publishing, telling the software when and where the content should go live
Finding Out What a Site Runs On (CMS Detection)
CMS Detection
See this value for your own site straight away: enter your address and your CMS Detection result, plus insights specific to this tool, will appear here.
Free, no sign-up needed; the analysis also personalizes every one of our tools for your site.
Our tool works on signatures: when it finds the traces it looks for on a page, it reports the matching result. Even when the traces match, the site may not really be running that CMS. So keep in mind that the tool can get it wrong.
The Most Widely Used CMS Platforms
WordPress
Matt was still a university student when he thought up a project, an inventive piece of CMS software. I remember the moment he first announced it very well. For its time it shipped with a single theme in the fashion of the ready made CMS platforms of the day, and it had nothing much to set it apart. I believed Matt would pull it off all the same, so I opened the first Turkish WordPress site and put a lot of work into introducing WordPress in Turkey.
In 2004 an idea came to Tobias: “why should I not sell snowboards over the internet?” He got Shopify going straight away and set up a snowboard sales portal. Once he had built an ecommerce foundation, he wanted to share it with everybody, and the Shopify we know today was born.
Set up and run Shopify
Wix
220 million users worldwide put Wix in 3rd place in the CMS showcase. In its early days, as far as I remember, Wix was fairly closed off and had no integrations. In 2023 it introduced Wix Headless and opened up its interaction with other applications. They keep improving and they keep growing on a rising trend.
Build and edit a site on Wix
Squarespace
“When I started Squarespace I just wanted to build a site for myself. I never thought it would become a business.” Anthony Casalena
Because there is no Turkish language support it is not used or known much in Turkey. It is still one of the most widely used content management systems out there. Using artificial intelligence, it can turn out very capable sites with little effort.
Build a website on Squarespace
Joomla
There was a period when the most widely used off the shelf CMS in the world was PHP-Nuke, and it had a hole in nearly every corner. Right at that moment Joomla shone like a light in the web world, with a trustworthy foundation and a user friendly system. Cüneyt Özbilen was following Joomla closely, and his name suggestion was Adabox. Cüneyt and I, who worked together during our Türk Dizayn years, pushed hard to have Joomla named Adabox, and it was not accepted.
Joomla does genuinely good work today, and if you want a solid foundation for your new project, it can meet that need.
A group of university friends wanted a way to talk among themselves. After Dries Buytaert graduated he published that work as Drupal, taking the name from the word for a drop of water, and shared the foundation with everybody. What happened next? It joined the ranks of the most widely used off the shelf CMS platforms in the world.
Adobe set out to open the door of the digital world to everybody, and built a space where designers and developers could share the work they produce. It is a technology where you can publish your portfolio and even find new clients. Behance is the leading example of that work.
Prestashop
“Unlock Your Commerce”
That is Prestashop’s main slogan. The platform offers an ecommerce foundation, as Shopify does. There is no Turkish language support, so it is not very popular in Turkey, and it is used a great deal around the world. It works well with Google Shopping and there is a WordPress plugin too.
Download and install Prestashop
Google Systems
Google has some genuinely functional sites for people who want to publish their own web pages. These are:
Speaking honestly, Webflow is a superb system and unbelievably easy to use. When Statista published the list, it turned out to be the system I liked most out of everything I saw.
Create a Webflow account
Published: Updated: Türk SEM Academy
Author
Tahir Dinç
SEO Specialist · Founder of Türk SEM
I began this work in 1999 and became an ODP editor in 2004. Today I provide SEO and Google Ads services to a great many large companies. I also chair Türk SEM Group and run the companies within it.
