Shopify is now the second most popular content management system

Posted by Matthias Gelbmann on 25 May 2020 in News, Content Management, Shopify

Tobias Lütke and Matt Mullenweg have a few things in common. They both dropped out of school or college and they both love writing software. Both were not satisfied with the tools at hand when they wanted to achieve something on the web. That was publishing his personal blog for Mullenweg, and selling snowboarding equipment for Lütke. So, they went on to build their own tools, that became the foundation of their companies, which are both worth billions now. We are, of course, talking about WordPress and Shopify.

While WordPress runs 36.6% of the web, Shopify has reached 2.4% now, up from 1.5% a year ago and from 0.1% six years ago, passing Joomla last weekend to become WordPress's closest competitor.

When looking at these figures it is worth noting, that in our statistics we count websites where we find technologies being used anywhere on the site, not necessarily on the whole site. For example, looking at PCMag, we find Shopify being used at shop.pcmag.com, but not at the magazine section of the site. The same it true, of course, for WordPress or indeed for any other of the thousands of technologies we monitor.

Shopify has also become the most popular hosted content management system. Squarespace comes next in that segment at 1.5% and Wix comes third at 1.4%. Squarespace was ahead of Shopify only 10 months ago. Shopify is also more popular than the leading WordPress hosting provider WP Engine at 1.4% and Shopify sites also outnumber the 0.5% of sites hosted by Automattic itself. Although, WP Engine and Automattic both have a bigger share of high traffic sites than Shopify.

The utter dominance of WordPress on the web is nicely demonstrated by another fact: Shopify as the second most popular CMS is not the most popular e-commerce platform, because the WordPress plugin WooCommerce clearly outnumbers it with 6.3% of the web. Shopify is, however, well ahead of the other big e-commerce systems Magento, OpenCart and PrestaShop., with Magento having a higher share of high-traffic sites.

Despite the strong competition by WooCommerce, Shopify is the most popular CMS on many e-commerce related domains, such as .shop, .store, .clothing and .jewelry,

As Shopify is a hosted system, we recognize it as a web hosting provider. In that category, Shopify with its 2.4% market share is on rank #7, ahead of hosting giants such as DigitalOcean, Microsoft and Alibaba. That fact by itself, I find, is a very remarkable achievement.

At 2.4% of the web using its technology stack, as a side-effect Shopify has a very significant impact on the statistics of other web technology categories. Shopify is based on Ruby on Rails, and is by far the biggest contributor to Ruby as a server-side programming language on rank #3, behind PHP and ASP.NET, but just ahead of Java. Shopify uses Cloudflare as content delivery network, like 13.1% of the sites on the web. Shopify is the biggest contributor here too, as 18% of the sites that use Cloudflare are Shopify sites. Similarly, as Shopify provides a Let's Encrypt SSL certificate for free, they significantly contribute to the success of Identrust, the root certificate provider of Let's Encrypt. 6% of the Let's Encrypt SSL certificate market if provided by Shopify.

93.7% of Shopify sites are in English, only around 1% are in Spanish, French, Portuguese and German. The countries with the highest share of Shopify sites are Australia (6.9%), New Zealand (6.8%), the Philippines (6.2%), Canada (4.7%) and USA (4.1%). Remarkable is also the share of NYC sites at 8.6%. On the other hand, Shopify share is relatively low in Japan (0.3%), China (less than 0.1%) and Russia (less than 0.1%).

We congratulate Tobias Lütke and his team of more than 5000 employees to this enormous success. The growth rates indicate, that we have seen only the beginning of it.

Much more details on the Shopify statistics can be found in our Shopify Market report.

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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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