I’m really interested in content management systems, and which sites use them. Out of curiosity, I’ve done a bit of research to find out which CMS is used the most. I was surprised by the results.
Takeaway
If my research is correct, it shows that most major news websites don’t use WordPress.
CMS usage across news websites
Note: if international versions of a site exist, the UK edition is linked below.
| Property | CMS | |
|---|---|---|
| BBC News | Bespoke | |
| Business Insider | Bespoke | |
| Buzzfeed | Bespoke | |
| City A.M. | Bespoke * | |
| CNET | Bespoke | |
| Express | Bespoke | |
| FT | Bespoke | |
| Guardian | Bespoke | |
| Independent | Drupal 7 | |
| Mail Online | Bespoke | |
| Mashable | Bespoke | |
| Metro | WordPress (VIP) | |
| Mirror | Bespoke | |
| New York Times | Bespoke | |
| Quartz | WordPress (VIP) | |
| ReadWrite | Bespoke | |
| Reuters | Bespoke | |
| Standard | Drupal 7 | |
| Star | Bespoke | |
| Sun | Bespoke * | |
| TechCrunch | WordPress (VIP) | |
| Telegraph | Escenic | |
| The Times | Bespoke | |
| TNW (The Next Web) | WordPress | |
| The Verge | Chorus * | |
| Vox | Chorus * | |
| Washington Post | WordPress + Bespoke Methode? |
More info (27 Aug 2015) More info (11 Mar 2016) |
| WSJ (Wall Street Journal) | Bespoke |
Footnotes
- City A.M. is mostly bespoke, but some parts are Drupal.
- The Sun appears to be bespoke, but BuiltWith.com suggests it is using WordPress.
- The Verge and Vox.com use Chorus, created by Vox Media. Technically speaking this is a bespoke product, and is currently used by Vox Media only.
Methods of checking
Viewing the page source of a website can give a few telltale signs as to the CMS that’s being used:
- WordPress is fairly easy to spot from the page source – “wp-content” in asset URLs is fairly common. WordPress VIP, or at least WordPress.com with a custom URL, will show a black navbar at the top of the site if you’re logged in.
- Drupal usually inserts a “meta generator” tag. If that’s missing, you can often tell a Drupal site from the /node/ URLs (if unchanged from the default settings) or the /taxonomy/term/xxx URLs for tagging.
- Some platforms, such as Chorus, make their presence known at the top of the source code as an HTML comment.
- Bespoke is harder to spot – generally if it’s not clear which CMS a site is using, it may be bespoke. Of course, that’s not a hard and fast rule.
- I’ve verified my findings with BuiltWith.com, although it doesn’t give 100% confirmation that a site is using a bespoke CMS.
Disclaimer
I cannot guarantee the table is 100% accurate. It’s quite possible that some of the sites I’ve listed as “bespoke” use an off-the-shelf CMS for the back-end publishing, with front-end output being rendered via a bespoke engine. Leave a comment or drop me an email if you know of anything that should be corrected.
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