Chris Inexperienced helped analyze 17 million web sites and co-authored the newest search engine marketing chapter for the Net Almanac, and his conclusion ought to matter to anybody who does search engine marketing for a residing.
Inexperienced said the data showed that particular person SEOs have “minimal” web-wide influence in contrast to CMS platform defaults.
He wrote:
“In the event you are actually decided to have an effect exterior of your particular shoppers … you want to be nudging WordPress or Wix or Shopify.”
We’ve been tracking 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 needed to hint the full 10-year arc. A handful of platforms quietly took management of how most of the internet handles technical search engine marketing. This article appears to be like at how that occurred and what the Net Almanac discovered when it appeared beneath 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 websites, Shopify had 0.3%, and Wix had 0.1%. Most of the internet (61.7%) didn’t use a CMS in any respect.
By 2022, WordPress had practically doubled to 43.2% of CMS-using websites and 65.2% of market share. Then its progress stopped. WordPress fell to 43.3% of all sites and 60.7% CMS share by October 2025, a 4.5-point drop in CMS share and its first sustained contraction in over twenty 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 progress hitting 32.6% in the yr ending October 2025), and Squarespace climbed from 0.5% to 3.4%.
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 once they have been of their prime.
One quantity caught my consideration. In accordance to W3Techs’ yearly usage trends, 61.7% of internet sites have been not detected utilizing any CMS that W3Techs tracks in 2015. In W3Techs information, that determine had fallen to 28.9%, which means WordPress’s share of all web sites is now bigger than the share categorized as “None.” In a couple of decade, the internet went from principally unmanaged to principally platform-driven, and other people in the trade didn’t cease to take into consideration what meaning for who controls the technical foundations.
WordPress, Shopify, and Wix now management about 73% of the total CMS market, and all three are well-funded operations.
Shopify posted $11.56 billion in 2025 revenue, 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 last yr as a public firm before 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 marketing for tens of millions of web sites without delay.
The maths has modified, too. A decade in the past, building a website meant WordPress or Drupal, and also you wanted a developer. At present, AI builders generate websites in minutes, and ease of use wins for small and mid-sized companies.
The place The search engine marketing Really Occurs
Inexperienced known as it “maybe the greatest shock” from the Net Almanac information. Platforms and their plugins drive many baseline technical search engine marketing defaults throughout a big share of the internet.
In accordance to 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 features monitor with CMS adoption charges, not with a wave of site-by-site optimization.
Yoast search engine marketing runs on 15.96% of all desktop web sites and accounts for practically 70% of all recognized search engine marketing instrument utilization. Yoast applies index,comply with as its default robots directive, and the Net Almanac recorded comply with 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 almost definitely clarification for his or her prevalence throughout the internet is one plugin’s default setting working on tens of millions of web sites no one individually configured.
Adoption of the llms.txt normal makes the level even sharper. The Net Almanac discovered 2.13% of web sites now have a sound llms.txt file, which appears to be like like early adoption of a brand new normal for AI crawlers. However 39.6% of these information have been auto-generated by All in One search engine marketing 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 normal.”
Most of what appears to be like like intentional adoption is a plugin working on autopilot. We coated this discovering when Green’s article published, and it caught with me as a result of it exhibits precisely how invisible the platform hand is. In lots of instances, adoption seems to come from plugin defaults reasonably than an specific resolution. A checkbox in a settings panel can allow it.
Structured information 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 information. That template-driven course of typically duplicates homepage-specific schema onto interior pages the place it doesn’t belong.
Picture optimization is comparable. Deliberate lazy loading utilizing loading="lazy" clusters amongst websites the place builders actively added it, whereas 68% of photos throughout the internet rely 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 information returning a sound 200 standing, pushed by CMS platforms producing legitimate information by default. However the precise contents are overwhelmingly the wildcard catch-all. A legitimate file exists, and no one configured what it says.
Wix exhibits how far platform-level search engine marketing can go. In accordance to Wix’s SEO settings documentation, the platform robotically creates Native Enterprise structured information markup for a website’s homepage when a enterprise identify and placement are added, and the consumer doesn’t want to know what structured information is. Evaluate that to WordPress, the place many website homeowners by no means add structured information in any respect with out specific steering or a plugin they discovered on their very own.
No platform publishes information on what number of customers override these defaults. A 3rd-party scan of 21,327 Squarespace homepages by SEOSpace turned up a mean search engine marketing rating of 40.5 out of 100, with 66.4% lacking alt textual content and 47% working a number of H1 tags. If these numbers are consultant, the platforms’ default settings are the complete sport for many websites.
Inexperienced didn’t hedge, writing:
“Quite a lot of SEOs imagine that Google owes us as a result of we keep the web for them … I additionally don’t assume now we have as a lot influence maybe at an trade stage as possibly some like to imagine.”
The Efficiency Paradox
The Core Net Vitals numbers add a component that’s arduous to clarify in case you assume higher defaults equal higher rankings.
WordPress has the lowest CWV pass rate of any platform at 45% on cellular, 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 marketing, the solely platform to do this two years working. WordPress scores 92.
And but a Rankability analysis 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 practically absent from the high 10,000 websites by visitors, whereas Drupal, with lower than 1% general CMS share, holds 6-7% amongst the highest-traffic websites.
We’ve been watching this develop throughout a number of years of CMS market share reporting. Prime WordPress websites spend money on premium internet hosting and cautious optimization and carry out properly, whereas common WordPress websites run on shared internet hosting with unoptimized plugins and drag the platform common down. Half fail CWV due to poor server response instances alone.
Managed platforms produce extra constant outcomes as a result of they management the total stack. The Net Almanac concluded that “platforms with extra tightly managed environments see the largest features.” Wix and Duda don’t permit 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 rate. However Shopify has structural search engine marketing limits that no quantity of default optimization can repair, together with necessary 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 flooring and the common, and experience units the ceiling. That hole is the place consulting nonetheless earns its preserve.
WordPress At A Crossroads
In accordance to W3Techs information, WordPress’s contraction began in 2022 due to market saturation and rising competitors. Then, the WP Engine dispute in September 2024 added a governance disaster on high of it.
Matt Mullenweg called WP Engine “a cancer to WordPress” in a September 2024 weblog publish. Days later, Mullenweg wrote that “WP Engine not has free entry to WordPress.org’s assets.” Search Engine Journal reported the change blocked many WP Engine clients from updating or putting in plugins and themes.
In October 2024, Automattic seized WP Engine’s Superior Customized Fields plugin, the first compelled takeover in WordPress’s 21-year historical past. WP Engine sued, and a courtroom granted a preliminary injunction in December 2024. Litigation continues into 2026.
BlackRock marked down its Automattic shares by a cumulative 63.5% in accordance to The Repository’s reporting on fund filings. Automattic misplaced 159 employees through a voluntary “alignment offer” in October 2024 and cut roughly 16% of its remaining workforce in April 2025. Improvement took the greatest 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 noted that Automattic had traditionally been the largest contributor to the WordPress challenge.
Five for the Future updates from May 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 typical three, and the proposed 2026 schedule targets a return to three.
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 internet relies upon on a platform whose growth tempo may be lower by one firm’s selections, that’s a danger most practitioners haven’t priced in.
Joost de Valk, Yoast search engine marketing’s founder, was removed from the speaker lineup at WordCamp Asia 2025 after Mullenweg declared him “persona non grata.” De Valk had called for governance changes that would cut back Mullenweg’s unilateral management over the challenge, 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 internet’s platform layer sits in too few arms, and for anybody advising shoppers on platform decisions, that’s value factoring in.
What This Means For Practitioners
For tens of millions of web sites on managed platforms, baseline technical search engine marketing is dealt with at the platform stage now. When Wix ships an enchancment, it touches tens of millions of dwell websites without delay. Particular person consultants work at a distinct scale fully.
What we’re seeing in the information and in our protection is that the highest-value work is transferring towards the edges. 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. Figuring out what Wix does out of the field versus what Shopify leaves to the consumer is platform-specific information that earns its worth when a shopper is selecting between them or migrating from one to the different.
The Squarespace scan turned up a 40.5/100 common search engine marketing rating throughout 21,000+ websites. Even on platforms with first rate defaults, there’s optimization work to do.
AI visibility is the latest layer. GPTBot mentions in robots.txt grew 55% year-over-year in accordance to the Net Almanac, and ClaudeBot practically doubled. Inexperienced warned that companies chopping bot crawling to save server prices “would possibly desperately influence your AI visibility.” Balancing crawl price range, AI coaching publicity, and AI search visibility is a name platforms can’t make for his or her customers. Practitioners nonetheless personal that one.
Wanting Forward
Once I began masking CMS market share at Search Engine Journal, the story was WordPress dominance and a fragmented discipline of small gamers. Ten years later, three platforms management 73% of the CMS market, and their engineering groups set the technical search engine marketing defaults for many of the internet.
Particular person search engine marketing professionals nonetheless matter at the website stage. However engineering groups at a handful of corporations now maintain extra mixed sway over technical search engine marketing than the consulting world does on its personal. Whether or not the trade has caught up with that actuality is the unanswered query.
Inexperienced’s closing line from his Net Almanac evaluation bears repeating. “In the event you are actually decided to have an effect,” he wrote, “you want to be nudging WordPress or Wix or Shopify.”
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