WordPress is strengthening its position as the dominating blogging platform or Content Management System (CMS) used by the world’s top 100 blogs. This year, WordPress is used by 52% of the top blogs, up from the 48% we identified in our study in 2012.
With over 65 million WordPress sites in the world, it’s clear that Automattic’s platform is popular. But let’s have a look at the entire top 100.
WordPress keeps on gaining in popularity
We grabbed the list of the top 100 blogs in the world from Technorati and tried to identify which blogging platform or CMS the site is using. Out of the 100 blogs, we could identify and verify the platform in use by 94 of the sites. For the other 6, we could not ourselves confirm the platform, nor did we get any replies from the sites when reaching out to them. You can read more about our methodology at the end of the article.
Here is the result of our 2013 study of the blogging platforms used by the top 100 blogs:
You can also download a larger version of this chart.
Comparing 2013 and 2012
Here are a few comments about what’s happened since our last study in 2012:
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In total, WordPress has increased from 48 to 52 out of the top 100 blogs.
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TypePad has increased somewhat, from 2 to 4 sites.
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Movable Type has decreased from 7 to 4 sites.
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Drupal dropped 1 site.
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Tumblr stays on the list with 1 site after making its entrance on the top 100 last year.
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CrowdFusion stays on the list with 1 site. It has since last year changed name to Ceros.
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Scoop was on the list last year, used by DailyKos.com. It may be that DailyKos is still using Scoop, but we could not verify this, therefore the site is now included in the N/A category.
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Among the switches during the year we noted that Mashable has moved from WordPress to Custom, and Twitter switched to Drupal from Blogger.
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Neatorama appears to be running a combination of Varo and WordPress, so we put it in the Custom category.
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Google’s Blogger gained a site and is now up to 3.
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The 6 sites marked as “N/A” we didn’t manage to get any information about. Even after repeatedly reaching out to the site owners and admins, we were unable to get any replies.
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It’s very likely that a big chunk of the “N/A” sites are, in fact, Custom, and if we add the two categories together, that’s 19% of the top 100 list.
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Last year we differentiated between hosted and self-hosted WordPress. This year, to simplify matters, we put all WordPress in one category.
And here are the aggregated results, including a comparison to 2012:
| Platform | 2012 | 2013 |
|---|---|---|
| WordPress | 48 | 52 |
| Custom | 14 | 12 |
| Drupal | 8 | 7 |
| N/A | 8 | 6 |
| Gawker | 5 | 5 |
| BlogSmith | 4 | 4 |
| Movable Type | 7 | 4 |
| TypePad | 2 | 4 |
| Blogger | 2 | 3 |
| Ceros | 1 | 1 |
| Joomla | 0 | 1 |
| Tumblr | 1 | 1 |
Complete list: top 100 blogs and their blog platforms
Here is the complete list of the top 100 blogs, presented in order of Technorati rank:
Blogging’s future
We’d like to send a big thank you to everyone that helped us out with this article. You are too many to mention, but we truly appreciate your help.
There’s no denying that blogging has changed in the last few years, especially with the arrival of social media like Facebook and Twitter. For many of us, what we used to blog about we now publish to social networks.
But there’s also no denying that blogging is not gone. It has, however, changed as has the tools used to publish blogs with. Some, like WordPress, started out as blogging platforms and has taken on more general content management functionality. Others have developed in the opposite direction. Even though we believe it will be increasingly hard to distinguish what is a blogging platform we are certainly interested in following the developments. Therefore, we already look forward to doing the same study next year again.
Which platform do you use and why? Let us know in the comments below.
Methodology: Since the Technorati Top 100 is updated every day, we froze our list on March 20, 2013, and then set out to investigate what blogging platform or CMS each site is using. For each site, we started by using third-party services like BuiltWith and Wappalyzer, to see if they would reveal anything about the site. If that did not give us any results, we proceeded with tools like host, whois, and dig. Only if that still didn’t tell us what we needed, did we get in touch with the site through contact details published. Out of the 100 sites we were unable to get confirmation for 6 sites.
I wonder how different a chart would look that took into account how many people actually read the blogs somehow. 🙂
That’s an interesting angle, Oliver 🙂
greatest break true
mashable.com is still using WordPress, you can see that pretty easily by visiting http://mashable.com/wp-admin/, they have their wp-admin behind HTTP Basic Auth.
They did recently move to a more hybrid approach whereby the front-end of the site is a javascript heavy webapp which interacts with the WordPress back-end via a JSON API.
tomwillmot Thanks very much, that gives WordPress another one then.
Pingdomtomwillmot
I did a comparison between 2012 and 2013 in Diff to see if some of
new WordPress-blogs were listed on other plattforms last year.
Found
out that two where listed as “custom” last year: Mac Rumours and Ars
Technica. For what I can see browsing thearchive.org and Google cache
both where on WordPress last year aswell as this year..
I am surprised to see http://www.buzzfeed.com/ is lower than http://www.tmz.com 🙁 Perhaps I don’t find tmz interesting. Buzzfeed has more funny and interesting stuff than Tmz, tho.
Tony – http://nextwave-creative.com
Great and insightful article! I think that a big follow up to this article it will one that shows statistics on plugins and ways that the top blog using WordPress are securing their WP installations. It will be a great contribution to the WP community as well.
Kaio Maia
nice
Hello are you using a plugin for the summary and “Tweet This”? Would love to know what it is – very good!
How many blogging platforms have blog posts show up in the top 10 results in search engines? I believe that Level One Network provides brings your post to the top rankings in search results.
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Great post
Are these results from any kind of poll?
Hi useful study do you have an updated one for 2014-2015? Would love to see how things have changed or does wordpress still have the major share?
wow found this but i was looking 2019 top blogs
This WP can be a great thing to share with everyone, especially blogging sites. It’s not connected to what I want to do, but I’m glad I read it.