Chris Inexperienced helped analyze 17 million web sites and co-authored the newest search engine optimisation chapter for the Net Almanac, and his conclusion ought to matter to anybody who does search engine optimisation for a residing.
Inexperienced mentioned the information confirmed that particular person SEOs have “minimal” web-wide affect in comparison with CMS platform defaults.
He wrote:
“In case you are actually decided to have an effect outdoors of your particular shoppers … you could be nudging WordPress or Wix or Shopify.”
We’ve been monitoring CMS market share at Search Engine Journal since WordPress crossed 39.5% of all web sites. Again then, the story was WordPress rising, whereas everybody else fought over scraps.
The story is totally different now, and Inexperienced’s discovering is why I wished to hint the complete 10-year arc. A handful of platforms quietly took management of how many of the net handles technical search engine optimisation. This text appears to be like at how that occurred and what the Net Almanac discovered when it appeared below the hood. It additionally appears to be like at what the information means for the individuals who do that work day-after-day.
How Three Platforms Took Management
In 2015, WordPress held 23.3% of all web sites, Shopify had 0.3%, and Wix had 0.1%. Many of the net (61.7%) didn’t use a CMS in any respect.
By 2022, WordPress had almost doubled to 43.2% of CMS-using websites and 65.2% of market share. Then its development stopped. WordPress fell to 43.3% of all websites and 60.7% CMS share by October 2025, a 4.5-point drop in CMS share and its first sustained contraction in over 20 years.
Whereas WordPress plateaued, three platforms grew at charges it by no means matched. Shopify rose from 0.7% to 7.2% (a 929% enhance, with development hitting 32.6% within the yr ending October 2025), and Squarespace climbed from 0.5% to three.4%.
Joomla and Drupal paid for it. They as soon as held roughly 14% of the CMS market mixed and now maintain lower than 3%. Joomla fell 79%, and Drupal fell 80%, each overtaken by platforms that hardly existed after they have been of their prime.
One quantity caught my consideration. In line with W3Techs’ yearly utilization developments, 61.7% of internet sites weren’t detected utilizing any CMS that W3Techs tracks in 2015. In W3Techs knowledge, that determine had fallen to twenty-eight.9%, that means WordPress’s share of all web sites is now bigger than the share categorized as “None.” In a couple of decade, the online went from principally unmanaged to principally platform-driven, and folks within the business didn’t cease to consider what which means for who controls the technical foundations.
WordPress, Shopify, and Wix now management about 73% of your entire CMS market, and all three are well-funded operations.
Shopify posted $11.56 billion in 2025 income, up 30% year-over-year. Wix hit $1.99 billion and posted its second consecutive yr of GAAP working revenue. Squarespace surpassed $1 billion in its closing yr as a public firm earlier than Permira acquired it for $7.2 billion in October 2024. Mixed 2025 income for Shopify and Wix alone topped $13.5 billion, and that cash funds engineering groups whose default settings govern search engine optimisation for thousands and thousands of web sites without delay.
The mathematics has modified, too. A decade in the past, constructing a web site meant WordPress or Drupal, and also you wanted a developer. Immediately, AI builders generate websites in minutes, and ease of use wins for small and mid-sized companies.
The place The search engine optimisation Truly Occurs
Inexperienced known as it “maybe the largest shock” from the Net Almanac knowledge. Platforms and their plugins drive many baseline technical search engine optimisation defaults throughout a big share of the online.
In line with the Almanac report, canonical tag utilization has risen to 68% of desktop pages (up from 65% in 2024), and meta robots utilization grew to 47% (up from 45.5%). These beneficial properties observe with CMS adoption charges, not with a wave of site-by-site optimization.
Yoast search engine optimisation runs on 15.96% of all desktop web sites and accounts for almost 70% of all recognized search engine optimisation instrument utilization. Yoast applies index,observe as its default robots directive, and the Net Almanac recorded observe directives on 64% of desktop pages and index on 69%. Each are technically pointless since search engines like google and yahoo default to indexing and following anyway. The most certainly rationalization for his or her prevalence throughout the online is one plugin’s default setting operating on thousands and thousands of web sites no one individually configured.
Adoption of the llms.txt customary makes the purpose even sharper. The Net Almanac discovered 2.13% of web sites now have a legitimate llms.txt file, which appears to be like like early adoption of a brand new customary for AI crawlers. However 39.6% of these recordsdata have been auto-generated by All in One search engine optimisation as a default function, and one other 3.6% got here from Yoast. The Net Almanac Notes it could possibly’t make certain this “is at all times a acutely aware act or endorsement of the llms.txt customary.”
Most of what appears to be like like intentional adoption is a plugin operating on autopilot. We coated this discovering when Inexperienced’s article revealed, and it caught with me as a result of it exhibits precisely how invisible the platform hand is. In lots of circumstances, adoption seems to come back from plugin defaults relatively than an specific resolution. A checkbox in a settings panel can allow it.
Structured knowledge follows the identical sample. Homepages obtain handbook consideration with constant JSON-LD markup, whereas interior pages run on CMS templates the place the platform dynamically handles structured knowledge. That template-driven course of typically duplicates homepage-specific schema onto interior pages the place it doesn’t belong.
Picture optimization is analogous. Deliberate lazy loading utilizing loading="lazy" clusters amongst websites the place builders actively added it, whereas 68% of photographs throughout the online depend on browser defaults. Most websites by no means made a selection about picture loading, and their platform made it for them.
Robots.txt validity has improved to 85% of recordsdata returning a legitimate 200 standing, pushed by CMS platforms producing legitimate recordsdata by default. However the precise contents are overwhelmingly the wildcard catch-all. A sound file exists, and no one configured what it says.
Wix exhibits how far platform-level search engine optimisation can go. In line with Wix’s search engine optimisation settings documentation, the platform routinely creates Native Enterprise structured knowledge markup for a web site’s homepage when a enterprise title and site are added, and the person doesn’t have to know what structured knowledge is. Examine that to WordPress, the place many web site homeowners by no means add structured knowledge in any respect with out specific steering or a plugin they discovered on their very own.
No platform publishes knowledge on what number of customers override these defaults. A 3rd-party scan of 21,327 Squarespace homepages by SEOSpace turned up a median search engine optimisation rating of 40.5 out of 100, with 66.4% lacking alt textual content and 47% operating a number of H1 tags. If these numbers are consultant, the platforms’ default settings are the entire recreation for many websites.
Inexperienced didn’t hedge, writing:
“A number of SEOs imagine that Google owes us as a result of we keep the web for them … I additionally don’t assume we’ve got as a lot affect maybe at an business stage as perhaps some wish to imagine.”
The Efficiency Paradox
The Core Net Vitals numbers add a component that’s exhausting to elucidate if you happen to assume higher defaults equal higher rankings.
WordPress has the bottom CWV go price of any platform at 45% on cell, whereas Duda leads at 85% and Wix hits 75% after gaining 14 proportion factors year-over-year. Wix additionally scores an ideal 100 on Lighthouse search engine optimisation, the one platform to do this two years operating. WordPress scores 92.
And but a Rankability evaluation of 59,000 high‑rating domains discovered that WordPress accounts for 49% of the websites utilizing a CMS, making it the dominant platform amongst high‑rating domains. Wix and Shopify are almost absent from the highest 10,000 websites by visitors, whereas Drupal, with lower than 1% general CMS share, holds 6-7% among the many highest-traffic websites.
We’ve been watching this develop throughout a number of years of CMS market share reporting. High WordPress websites put money into premium internet hosting and cautious optimization and carry out nicely, whereas common WordPress websites run on shared internet hosting with unoptimized plugins and drag the platform common down. Half fail CWV as a consequence of poor server response occasions alone.
Managed platforms produce extra constant outcomes as a result of they management your entire stack. The Net Almanac concluded that “platforms with extra tightly managed environments see the biggest beneficial properties.” Wix and Duda don’t enable the variability that creates WordPress’s lengthy tail.
Shopify complicates this additional. Regardless of being an ecommerce platform, historically the heaviest class for efficiency, it achieves a 77.95% good CWV price. However Shopify has structural search engine optimisation limits that no quantity of default optimization can repair, together with obligatory URL prefixes (/merchandise/, /collections/, /pages/), duplicate content material from collection-path URLs, and a 100,000 redirect restrict that requires human experience to navigate.
Platform defaults set the ground and the typical, and experience units the ceiling. That hole is the place consulting nonetheless earns its maintain.
WordPress At A Crossroads
In line with W3Techs knowledge, WordPress’s contraction began in 2022 as a consequence of market saturation and rising competitors. Then, the WP Engine dispute in September 2024 added a governance disaster on high of it.
Matt Mullenweg known as WP Engine “a most cancers to WordPress” in a September 2024 weblog publish. Days later, Mullenweg wrote that “WP Engine not has free entry to WordPress.org’s sources.” Search Engine Journal reported the change blocked many WP Engine prospects from updating or putting in plugins and themes.
In October 2024, Automattic seized WP Engine’s Superior Customized Fields plugin, the primary pressured takeover in WordPress’s 21-year historical past. WP Engine sued, and a court docket granted a preliminary injunction in December 2024. Litigation continues into 2026.
BlackRock marked down its Automattic shares by a cumulative 63.5% in line with The Repository’s reporting on fund filings. Automattic misplaced 159 staff by way of a voluntary “alignment provide” in October 2024 and lower roughly 16% of its remaining workforce in April 2025. Improvement took the largest hit. The Verge reported that in January 2025, Automattic lower its open-source contribution hours from roughly 3,988 per week to 45. The Repository famous that Automattic had traditionally been the biggest contributor to the WordPress undertaking.
5 for the Future updates from Could 2024 confirmed Automattic-sponsored hours made up about half of tracked sponsored contributions. WordPress shipped two main releases in 2025 as an alternative of the standard three, and the proposed 2026 schedule targets a return to a few.
Between December 2024 and December 2025, WordPress contracted 2.9% whereas Wix grew 22.4% and Squarespace grew 6.2% in market share. No mass exodus, as a result of switching prices are too excessive. However the dispute uncovered a focus danger. When 43% of the online is dependent upon a platform whose improvement tempo could be lower by one firm’s selections, that’s a danger most practitioners haven’t priced in.
Joost de Valk, Yoast search engine optimisation’s founder, was faraway from the speaker lineup at WordCamp Asia 2025 after Mullenweg declared him “persona non grata.” De Valk had known as for governance modifications that would cut back Mullenweg’s unilateral management over the undertaking, and twenty veteran core committers signed an open letter calling for “community-minded” governance. Mullenweg partially reversed course in mid-2025 by lifting bans and resuming contributions, however group belief hasn’t recovered.
That dispute didn’t trigger the market decline, which began two years earlier. However it made clear what occurs when management over 43% of the online’s platform layer sits in too few fingers, and for anybody advising shoppers on platform decisions, that’s price factoring in.
What This Means For Practitioners
For thousands and thousands of web sites on managed platforms, baseline technical search engine optimisation is dealt with on the platform stage now. When Wix ships an enchancment, it touches thousands and thousands of dwell websites without delay. Particular person consultants work at a unique scale totally.
What we’re seeing within the knowledge and in our protection is that the highest-value work is transferring towards the perimeters. Migration consulting is high-risk and high-value as a result of Shopify’s 100,000 redirect restrict alone creates demand, and sophisticated CMS migrations carry actual visitors danger.
Auditing platform defaults matter extra now, too. Understanding what Wix does out of the field versus what Shopify leaves to the person is platform-specific data that earns its worth when a consumer is selecting between them or migrating from one to the opposite.
The Squarespace scan turned up a 40.5/100 common search engine optimisation rating throughout 21,000+ websites. Even on platforms with respectable defaults, there’s optimization work to do.
AI visibility is the latest layer. GPTBot mentions in robots.txt grew 55% year-over-year in line with the Net Almanac, and ClaudeBot almost doubled. Inexperienced warned that companies slicing bot crawling to save lots of server prices “would possibly desperately affect your AI visibility.” Balancing crawl funds, AI coaching publicity, and AI search visibility is a name platforms can’t make for his or her customers. Practitioners nonetheless personal that one.
Trying Forward
Once I began protecting CMS market share at Search Engine Journal, the story was WordPress dominance and a fragmented area of small gamers. Ten years later, three platforms management 73% of the CMS market, and their engineering groups set the technical search engine optimisation defaults for many of the net.
Particular person search engine optimisation professionals nonetheless matter on the web site stage. However engineering groups at a handful of firms now maintain extra mixed sway over technical search engine optimisation than the consulting world does by itself. Whether or not the business has caught up with that actuality is the unanswered query.
Inexperienced’s closing line from his Net Almanac evaluation bears repeating. “In case you are actually decided to have an effect,” he wrote, “you could be nudging WordPress or Wix or Shopify.”
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