Open Source CMS Popularity: Project Site Traffic

Judging the market share of open source content management systems with numerical accuracy is a difficult proposition due to the lack of direct metrics on adoption rates. As a result, in creating the 2008 report, we focused on a number of indirect indicators and then cross-correlated them to reach our conclusions. One of the (many) indicators we examined was the popularity of the primary project site for each particular system.

In July water&stone will be releasing the 2009 Open Source CMS Market Share Report. In the course of preparing that report, I will be posting various metrics and indicators that might be of interest (and stimulate some discussion). Get a copy of the 2008 Open Source CMS Market Share Report at water&stone.

As per the 2008 report, the top three systems were WordPress, Joomla and Drupal. In this article, I look at the Compete data for the primary project sites of The Big Three: wordpress.org, joomla.org and drupal.org. The charts that follow give a snapshot of activity on the primary project sites.

WordPress shows not only higher numbers of unique visitors but also a faster growth rate. Joomla and Drupal appear to be neck and neck, though Drupal shows a lead across all 13 months of the assessment period.

The Visits numbers are consistent with the Unique Visitors stats. However, it could be argued that the Visits number makes an even stronger case for market dominance by WordPress. The growth rate for Visits to the WordPress exceed the rates for both Joomla and Drupal by a ratio of 2:1.

Compete Rank is similar to Alexa rankings. This chart shows the site's ranking relative to all others on the web. While the rankings of the project sites are consistent, the growth crown here is clearly held by Joomla!

The Quick Analysis

The charts are consistent across all three metrics, showing WordPress with a lead over both Joomla! and Drupal. (The problem that again raises its head is to what extent the WordPress traffic is related to the WordPress CMS rather than the WordPress blogging service. Put another way, how many people looking for wordpress.com went to wordpress.org by mistake?) Looking at the race between Joomla! and Drupal, Drupal appears to hold a slight edge over Joomla! in the raw numbers, but Joomla! seems to be growing faster.

For those who prefer raw numbers over pretty pictures, consider the following, again from Compete:

 Thoughts?

Stay tuned for more over the next few weeks...