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You are here: Home / General / Most major news websites don’t use WordPress

8th August 2015 by Ben Barden

Most major news websites don’t use WordPress

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.

Filed Under: General Tagged With: bespoke cms, cms, news sites, publishing, wordpress

About the author

Web dev, bug finder, writer of niche music
Founder/coder at switchscores.com
TechOps at Octopus Energy Read More…

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