Website Builder Statistics (2026)

A data analysis of how many websites exist, which CMSs and website builders run them, how the hosted builders are growing according to their own filings, and which platforms actually pass Google’s speed test.

WordPress powers 40.2% of all websites and holds 58.7% of the CMS market, per W3Techs data for 2 October 2026. Shopify (7.8%), Wix (6.1%), and Squarespace (3.6%) follow, and all three are still gaining share while WordPress slowly gives it back. Below are the cited numbers on how many websites exist, who builds them, how the hosted website builders are growing, and which platforms pass Core Web Vitals.

Key takeaways

• 40.2% of all websites run WordPress, a 58.7% share of sites with a known CMS, per W3Techs. WordPress.org’s own About page still says “over 43%”, so the honest range is 40-43%.
• WordPress’s CMS share fell from 65.2% in January 2022 to 58.7% in October 2026, per W3Techs’ yearly trend.
• Shopify holds 7.8% of the CMS market, Wix 6.1%, Squarespace 3.6% (W3Techs). HTTP Archive’s Web Almanac puts Shopify at 7.3-7.8% and Wix at about 5%.
• Netcraft counted 1,494,915,628 websites across 305,348,459 domains in its July 2026 survey.
• Wix had 304.2 million registered users and about 6.1 million premium subscriptions at the end of 2025, per its annual report.
• Shopify facilitated $378.4 billion in GMV in 2025, up 29%, on $11.6 billion of Shopify revenue (Shopify).
• 81.2% of Wix mobile origins pass Core Web Vitals, versus 48.7% for WordPress, in HTTP Archive’s August 2026 data (our calculation from its raw counts).
• 179.1 million .com and .net domains were registered at the end of Q2 2026, up 5.1% in a year (Verisign).
• Framer hit a $2 billion valuation and $50 million in ARR in 2025, per TechCrunch, citing the company.

How many websites are there in 2026?

Netcraft’s July 2026 Web Server Survey counted 1,494,915,628 websites across 305,348,459 domains, up from 1,275,138,490 sites a year earlier (Netcraft). Many of those hostnames are parked or inactive, so the number of maintained websites is far smaller. Domain registrations are a steadier gauge of real demand.

1. Netcraft counted 1,494,915,628 sites, 305,348,459 domains, and 14,772,048 web-facing computers in July 2026 (Netcraft). A “site” in this survey is any hostname that answers, so the total includes parked pages and auto-generated subdomains. Treat it as the outer bound of the web, not a count of businesses online.
2. A year earlier, the same survey found 1,275,138,490 sites across 280,876,958 domains (Netcraft, July 2025). Hostname totals swing month to month as hosts add or drop large blocks of parked domains. The domain count moves more slowly and tells you more.
3. Verisign ended Q2 2026 with 179.1 million .com and .net registrations, a 5.1 percent increase year over year (Verisign). Those two extensions are the closest thing to a census of commercial web addresses.
4. Verisign processed 12.7 million new .com and .net registrations in Q2 2026, compared with 10.4 million a year earlier (Verisign). New registrations are running well ahead of last year’s pace. People are still starting new sites, not only consolidating old ones.
5. Wix alone says more than 85,000 sites are created on its platform every day (Wix). That is a vendor claim, not an audited figure. It still shows how cheap and fast a first website has become.

What percentage of websites use a CMS or website builder?

Most of them. W3Techs finds that only 31.5% of websites use none of the content management systems it tracks, so more than two in three run a CMS or hosted builder (W3Techs). HTTP Archive’s 2025 crawl puts CMS adoption at over 54% of observed websites (Web Almanac).

6. 31.5% of websites use no CMS that W3Techs monitors (W3Techs). That share was 61.7% in January 2015 and 28.6% in January 2026, per W3Techs’ usage history. The jump back to 31.5% this year lines up almost exactly with WordPress’s usage falling from 43.0% to 40.2% over the same months.
7. HTTP Archive measured CMS use on over 54% of observed websites in 2025 (Web Almanac). Desktop adoption rose from 42% to 55% between 2021 and 2025, and mobile from 43% to 54%. The Almanac’s authors say sites without a CMS “are declining every year.”
8. CMS adoption varies by country: 51% of mobile sites in Italy and 49% in the US and UK, but 25% in Indonesia and 32% in Brazil (Web Almanac). Hosted platforms concentrate in North America and Western Europe. Open-source systems are relatively stronger in parts of Asia and Eastern Europe.

W3Techs and HTTP Archive sample the web differently and use different detection rules, so their totals do not match. Both point the same way: a hand-coded website is now the exception, and the real decision is which platform, not whether to use one.

What is the CMS market share in 2026?

WordPress leads with 58.7% of the CMS market, followed by Shopify (7.8%), Wix (6.1%), Squarespace (3.6%), and Joomla (1.6%), per W3Techs for 2 October 2026. No other platform tops 1.2%. The market is one giant, three mid-sized hosted platforms, and a long tail of specialists.

Source: W3Techs CMS overview and market share history, retrieved 2 October 2026.

9. WordPress runs on 40.2% of all websites, a 58.7% CMS market share (W3Techs). That is more than seven times the share of its nearest rival.
10. Shopify is the largest hosted platform: 5.4% of all websites and 7.8% of the CMS market (W3Techs). HTTP Archive’s independent crawl agrees, putting Shopify at 7.3-7.8% CMS share (Web Almanac).
11. Wix runs 4.2% of all websites, a 6.1% CMS share (W3Techs). HTTP Archive measures Wix at about 5%, a lower but still clear third place.
12. Squarespace holds 2.4% of all websites and 3.6% of the CMS market (W3Techs). The Web Almanac puts it at roughly 3%.
13. Framer holds 0.3% of the CMS market, Weebly 0.6%, and Hostinger’s builder 0.4% (W3Techs). Ghost sits at 0.1%, and Carrd appears in W3Techs’ list of systems below 0.1%.
14. Lovable, v0, and Canva Website Builder each now hold 0.1% of the CMS market (W3Techs). It is a small number. It also puts prompt-to-site AI tools in the same table as Joomla and Drupal.

What it means: the market is not fragmenting into hundreds of equal options. Four platforms hold most of the CMS share, and the long tail is long because every niche (restaurants, schools, real estate, AI app builders) spawns its own builder. For most buyers, the shortlist is short.

How many websites use WordPress?

40.2% of all websites run WordPress, per W3Techs in October 2026, which is 58.7% of sites with a known CMS. WordPress.org’s About page says “over 43%”, which matched W3Techs’ 43.0% usage figure in January 2026. HTTP Archive finds WordPress on roughly 64% of CMS-driven sites (Web Almanac).

15. 63.9% of WordPress sites run version 7, and 29.0% run version 6 (W3Techs). Another 4.8% still run version 5 and 2.0% run version 4. On a platform this large, that tail is a lot of sites running years-old releases.
16. WordPress.org lists over 74,000 free plugins in its plugin directory. That depth is the real reason WordPress keeps its lead. It is also why two WordPress sites can perform completely differently.
17. Elementor runs on 31.5% of WordPress sites and WooCommerce on 19.8% (W3Techs). WPBakery follows at 7.4%. A large share of WordPress sites are built with a visual page builder bolted on top, not with the native editor.
18. HTTP Archive estimates that around 60% of WordPress sites use a page builder (Web Almanac). Among those builders, Elementor’s share fell from about 56% in 2024 to 43% in 2025, while the WordPress Block Editor grew to around 18%.
19. Among the top 10,000 websites, WordPress accounts for roughly 58% of CMS usage, and Drupal about 6-7% (Web Almanac). Drupal holds just 0.9% of the overall CMS market per W3Techs, so it punches far above its weight at the high-traffic end. Wix and Shopify are almost absent at that level.

For a full scored review of the platform itself, see our WordPress page.

Is WordPress losing market share?

Yes, slowly. WordPress’s share of the CMS market peaked at 65.2% in January 2022 and has fallen every January since, reaching 58.7% on 2 October 2026, per W3Techs. Its share of all websites peaked at 43.6% in January 2025 and now sits at 40.2%.

20. WordPress’s CMS share went 63.7% (2023), 62.9% (2024), 62.0% (2025), 60.2% (January 2026), 58.7% (October 2026) (W3Techs). The slide has not slowed: the drop from 60.2% to 58.7% took just nine months.
21. WordPress’s usage across all websites peaked at 43.6% in January 2025 and is 40.2% today (W3Techs usage history). That is still four in ten websites.
22. Joomla’s CMS share fell from 8.6% in January 2015 to 1.6% today, and Drupal’s from 5.1% to 0.9% (W3Techs). The older open-source CMSs lost far more ground than WordPress has.
23. HTTP Archive says WordPress’s 2025 decline was under one percentage point and that no single rival is causing it (Web Almanac). The Almanac calls it WordPress’s “first sustained slowdown” and describes gains spread across Shopify, Wix, and Squarespace.

What it means: WordPress is not collapsing. Our read is that it is losing new, small sites to hosted builders that bundle hosting, security, and templates into one bill. If you already run a healthy WordPress site, these numbers are not a reason to migrate.

Which website builders are growing fastest?

Wix and Shopify. Wix’s CMS share more than doubled, from 2.9% in January 2022 to 6.1% in October 2026, and Shopify’s rose from 6.6% to 7.8%, per W3Techs. Duda (0.3% to 1.1%), Tilda (0.5% to 1.2%), and Webflow (0.7% to 1.2%) grew from much smaller bases.

CMS market share. Source: W3Techs yearly trends, retrieved 2 October 2026.

24. Shopify went from 7.0% to 7.8% of the CMS market between January and October 2026 (W3Techs). That is the biggest 2026 gain of any platform in W3Techs’ yearly trend table.
25. Wix moved from 5.8% to 6.1% over the same months, after a strong 2025 in which it climbed from 4.6% (W3Techs).
26. Webflow has held at 1.2% since January 2026, after rising from 0.2% in 2019 (W3Techs). In share terms, its growth has paused this year.
27. HTTP Archive’s 2025 crawl shows Wix’s growth slowing to an effectively flat 5.2%, while Squarespace gained roughly 0.2-0.3 points (Web Almanac). The two trackers disagree on Wix’s momentum: W3Techs shows continued gains and HTTP Archive shows a plateau. Use the direction both agree on, which is up from 2022.
28. GoDaddy Website Builder rose from 0.4% in 2022 to 0.9% (W3Techs). Duda nearly quadrupled, from 0.3% to 1.1%, over the same period.

How many users does Wix have?

Wix reported 304.2 million registered users and approximately 6.1 million premium subscriptions as of 31 December 2025 in its annual report. Revenue rose 13% to $1.99 billion in 2025. That works out to about one premium subscription for every 50 registered users.

29. Registered users rose from 282.4 million at the end of 2024 to 304.2 million at the end of 2025 (Wix 2024 annual report; 2025 annual report). The 2025 count includes users of Base44, the no-code app builder Wix acquired in 2025, so the two years are not perfectly comparable.
30. Premium subscriptions slipped from approximately 6.2 million to 6.1 million while revenue grew 13%, from $1.76 billion to $1.99 billion (Wix). Wix credits higher average revenue per premium subscription, users buying pricier packages, and a price increase implemented in early 2024.
31. 83% of Wix premium subscriptions are yearly or multi-year; 17% are monthly (Wix). Wix’s annual report notes that yearly plans leave fewer chances for a subscription to lapse than monthly ones.
32. In Q2 2026, Wix revenue was $563.1 million, up 15%, and total ARR reached $1.963 billion (Wix Q2 2026). Wix attributes the growth to Base44 and continued core website growth.
33. Partners revenue, from agencies and freelancers building sites for clients, grew 17% to $213.8 million in Q2 2026 (Wix). That is the Wix Studio audience, and it is growing faster than the company overall.
34. Wix’s own site cites 300M+ users in 190 countries (Wix). The audited 304.2 million figure from the annual report is the one to quote.

See our Wix review for how the product scores against these numbers.

How big are Shopify, Squarespace, and GoDaddy?

Shopify is the giant: $11,556 million in 2025 revenue, up 30%, and $378.4 billion in GMV, up 29%, per its Q4 2025 release. Squarespace last reported over 5.2 million unique subscriptions in mid-2024 before Permira took it private. GoDaddy counts 20.5 million customers (GoDaddy).

Sources: Wix FY2025 20-F; Shopify Q4 2025 release; Squarespace Q2 2024 release; GoDaddy Q2 2026 release; Webflow About page; TechCrunch citing Framer. Links in the Sources list below.

35. Shopify’s Q2 2026 GMV was $115,567 million, up 32%, and revenue was $3,583 million, up 34% (Shopify Q2 2026). Revenue growth accelerated from 31% in the same quarter a year earlier.
36. Shopify’s monthly recurring revenue reached $221 million at 30 June 2026, up from $185 million (Shopify). Subscription revenue grew 22% to $802 million, while merchant solutions grew 37% to $2,781 million. Shopify now earns most of its money from payments and services, not plan fees.
37. Shopify says it holds more than 14% US ecommerce market share, based on its 2025 US GMV (Shopify), and its About page counts $1 trillion+ in cumulative sales by Shopify merchants.
38. Squarespace’s last public quarter (Q2 2024) showed revenue of $296.8 million, up 20%, and over 5.2 million unique subscriptions, up 21% (Squarespace). Annual run rate revenue was $1,179.5 million.
39. Permira completed its acquisition of Squarespace on 17 October 2024 at an aggregated transaction value of approximately $7.2 billion, and Squarespace left the New York Stock Exchange (Permira). Any newer Squarespace subscriber count is either a marketing claim or a third-party estimate. Treat 2024 as the last audited data point for Squarespace.
40. GoDaddy reported 20.5 million customers in Q2 2026, up just 22 thousand in the quarter, with revenue of $1.3 billion, up 7%, and ARPU of $250 (GoDaddy). Its growth now comes from selling more to existing customers, not from adding new ones.
41. GoDaddy’s Airo AI product reached an annualized bookings run rate of $50 million, five times the $10 million of one quarter earlier (GoDaddy).

How fast are Webflow and Framer growing?

Webflow reports 3.5M users and $335M in total funding on its About page, and W3Techs gives it 1.2% of the CMS market. Framer reached a $2 billion valuation in August 2025 after a $100 million Series D, with $50 million in ARR, per TechCrunch. Framer’s CMS share is 0.3%.

42. Webflow, founded in 2013, lists 3.5M users and $335M in total funding (Webflow). Note the gap between 3.5M users and a 1.2% CMS share: user accounts are not live sites. Read our Webflow review for the full verdict.
43. Framer claims over half a million monthly active users and reached $50 million in annual recurring revenue in 2025, per a spokesperson quoted by TechCrunch. The company said it aimed to cross $100 million the following year and that businesses had become the majority of its new customers.
44. Framer says 40% of Y Combinator’s most recent batch use it (TechCrunch). Startups are a core market, which our Framer review reflects.
45. Framer’s State of Sites 2026 survey of 1,900+ professionals found that 53% of website work is general edits and fixes (Framer). Teams spend more time maintaining sites than improving them.
46. 70% of website projects get deprioritized because they are too slow or difficult to ship, and 71% of teams say conversion is a top KPI (Framer). This is a vendor survey, so read it as directional. The pattern still rings true: the bottleneck is editing speed, not features. For conversion benchmarks, see our landing page statistics.

Which website builder has the best Core Web Vitals?

Duda, GoDaddy, and Wix lead. In HTTP Archive’s August 2026 data, 86.0% of Duda mobile origins, 83.8% of GoDaddy Website Builder origins, and 81.2% of Wix origins pass Core Web Vitals, against 53.0% of all origins and 48.7% for WordPress (HTTP Archive; our calculation from its raw counts).

Source: HTTP Archive Core Web Vitals Technology Report. Pass rates are our calculation: origins with good Core Web Vitals divided by origins tested, from the report’s published counts.

47. WordPress improved from 45.0% to 48.7% over the year but still sits below the all-web average of 53.0% (HTTP Archive). The Web Almanac’s 2025 analysis matches: WordPress “remains among the lowest-ranked with a pass rate of 45%” (Web Almanac).
48. Wix jumped from 73.9% to 81.2% of mobile origins passing (HTTP Archive). The Web Almanac recorded Wix at 74% in 2025 and named it the biggest year-over-year gainer among CMSs.
49. Shopify passes on 76.5% of 443,647 mobile origins tested, the largest sample of any hosted platform (HTTP Archive). Keeping three in four stores in the “good” band across a sample that large is a strong result.
50. Squarespace (72.1%), Webflow (71.2%), and Framer (70.6%) cluster together on mobile; on desktop, Framer leads that group at 87.1% (HTTP Archive). Webflow and Framer score far higher on desktop than on mobile; Squarespace is the reverse, at 66.4% on desktop.
51. Weebly is the only platform in the table that got worse, falling from 47.1% to 42.7% (HTTP Archive). The Web Almanac also flagged Weebly as the one CMS that declined in 2025.
52. Median Lighthouse mobile performance scores: Wix 64, Webflow 58, Duda 57, Shopify 52, WordPress 41 (Web Almanac). These are lab scores, so read them as context next to the real-user pass rates above.
53. Squarespace pages are the heaviest, with a median mobile weight of 3,974 KB, against 2,894 KB for WordPress and 2,900 KB for Joomla (Web Almanac). The average page in 2025 weighed about 2.67 MB on desktop and 2.28 MB on mobile.

What it means: platforms that control the whole stack (hosting, image handling, code output) pass Core Web Vitals far more often. WordPress can be just as fast, but the median WordPress site carries the weight of its theme, page builder, and plugins. The Web Almanac’s own conclusion is that WordPress performance varies more by configuration than by core.

What to do with this data

The numbers support a simple rule: pick the platform that matches who will maintain the site, then stop adding tools around it.

• No developer on the team? Start with a hosted builder. Wix, Duda, and GoDaddy’s builder put 80% or more of mobile origins in the “good” Core Web Vitals band, without plugin or hosting decisions. Compare options in our website builder rankings.
• Choose WordPress for control and plugin depth, and budget for performance. It runs 40.2% of the web, but fewer than half of its mobile origins pass Core Web Vitals. The Web Almanac traces most of WordPress’s speed variance to configuration: themes, plugins, and page builders.
• Selling products? Shopify’s numbers are hard to argue with. It facilitated $378.4 billion in GMV in 2025 and passes Core Web Vitals on 76.5% of mobile origins.
• Design-led marketing team? Shortlist Webflow and Framer. Both trade some mobile speed for design control. Framer’s own survey says 53% of website work is edits and fixes, so test how fast your team can ship a change, not how impressive the demo looks.
• Need one page, not a site? A single-page tool like Carrd or a dedicated landing page builder is cheaper than a full builder you will barely use.
• Running solo? Our solopreneur picks favor one all-in-one builder over a stitched stack. See how we score tools on our about page, and the companion data on small business software and landing page conversion.

Frequently asked questions

What percentage of websites use WordPress?

WordPress runs on 40.2% of all websites and holds a 58.7% share of sites with a known CMS, per W3Techs in October 2026. WordPress.org’s About page claims “over 43%”, which matched W3Techs’ January 2026 figure. Usage has drifted down from a 43.6% peak in January 2025.

What is the most popular website builder?

Among hosted builders, Shopify leads with 7.8% of the CMS market, followed by Wix at 6.1% and Squarespace at 3.6%, per W3Techs. For general websites rather than stores, Wix is the most popular hosted builder, with 304.2 million registered users at the end of 2025.

How many websites are there in 2026?

Netcraft’s July 2026 survey counted 1,494,915,628 websites across 305,348,459 domains (Netcraft). Many are parked or inactive. Verisign reports 179.1 million .com and .net registrations as of Q2 2026, which is a better proxy for how many organizations hold a web address.

How many people use Wix?

Wix reported approximately 304.2 million registered users and about 6.1 million premium subscriptions on 31 December 2025, per its annual report. The user count includes its Base44 app builder, so it is not only website owners. Revenue grew 13% to $1.99 billion in 2025.

Is Squarespace still growing?

Its share of the CMS market rose from 3.4% in January 2026 to 3.6% in October, per W3Techs. Squarespace stopped publishing results after Permira took it private in October 2024. Its last public report showed over 5.2 million unique subscriptions, up 21%, in Q2 2024.

Which website builder is fastest?

On real-user Core Web Vitals, Duda (86.0% of mobile origins passing), GoDaddy Website Builder (83.8%), and Wix (81.2%) lead in HTTP Archive’s August 2026 data (HTTP Archive). WordPress trails at 48.7%, below the 53.0% average for all origins, though it improved from 45.0% a year earlier.

Is WordPress declining?

Slowly. Its CMS market share fell from a 65.2% peak in January 2022 to 58.7% in October 2026, per W3Techs. The Web Almanac describes 2025 as WordPress’s first sustained slowdown, with gains spread across Shopify, Wix, and Squarespace rather than one rival.

How many websites use Shopify?

Shopify runs on 5.4% of all websites and holds 7.8% of the CMS market, per W3Techs. Its platform facilitated $378.4 billion in GMV in 2025, and Shopify says it holds more than 14% of US ecommerce, per its Q4 2025 release.

How we compiled these statistics

Every figure here comes from 24 publisher pages, filings, and datasets, each retrieved on 2 October 2026: W3Techs, Netcraft, HTTP Archive, Verisign, SEC filings from Wix, Shopify, Squarespace, and GoDaddy, and the vendors’ own pages. Core Web Vitals pass rates are our calculation from HTTP Archive’s published counts (origins passing divided by origins tested). Figures we could not trace to a primary page were omitted, including BuiltWith’s site counts, which blocked retrieval, and where trackers disagree we show both numbers.

Sources

• W3Techs: Usage statistics and market share of content management systems (2026)
• W3Techs: Usage statistics and market share of WordPress (2026)
• W3Techs: Market share yearly trends for content management systems (2026)
• W3Techs: Usage yearly trends for content management systems (2026)
• Netcraft: July 2026 Web Server Survey (2026)
• Netcraft: July 2025 Web Server Survey (2025)
• Verisign: Second Quarter 2026 Earnings Release (2026)
• HTTP Archive: Web Almanac 2025, CMS chapter (2026)
• HTTP Archive: Core Web Vitals Technology Report (2026)
• WordPress.org: About WordPress (2026)
• WordPress.org: Plugin Directory (2026)
• Wix: Form 20-F for fiscal 2025 (2026)
• Wix: Form 20-F for fiscal 2024 (2025)
• Wix: Second Quarter 2026 Results (2026)
• Wix: About Us (2026)
• Shopify: Fourth-Quarter and Full-Year 2025 Results (2026)
• Shopify: Second-Quarter 2026 Results (2026)
• Shopify: About Shopify (2026)
• Squarespace: Second Quarter 2024 Financial Results (2024)
• Permira: Permira Completes Acquisition of Squarespace (2024)
• GoDaddy: Second Quarter 2026 Financial Results (2026)
• Webflow: About Webflow (2026)
• TechCrunch: No-code website builder Framer reaches $2B valuation (2025)
• Framer: State of Sites 2026 (2026)