Wix Market Share
The beauty of creating a website these days is that you have so many available options. Growing demands mean that website builders like Wix are on the rise. But just how many website owners will be signing up for this platform?
In a nutshell:
- ‘What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG)’ website builders like Wix are likely to continue growing in popularity.
- In particular, Wix’s market share should continue to expand over the next few years.
Naturally, we wouldn’t offer these kinds of predictions without any evidence to back them up. Below, we’ve put together some handy statistics about Wix’s market share, compared its performance with other well-known website builders and come to some conclusions about its likely future.
There are currently over 3.3 million websites using Wix
According to real-time research carried out by BuiltWith, over 3,800,000 websites are currently powered by Wix. W3 Techs also found that Wix is the sixth most popular Content Management System (CMS) in the world:
Although on the surface sixth place may not sound that impressive, it’s important to consider the software Wix is up against. It’s outranked primarily by WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal – the three most popular CMSs out there.
As you can see above, Wix’s market share is above 1.0% of the CMS market, which isn’t a figure to ignore. By reaching that number, Wix has been able to beat other well-known website-building platforms, including Magento and BigCommerce.
Wait… is Wix even a CMS?
The answer to that question is: “Yes and no”. Wix is a CMS in the sense that it enables you to manage content online. However, it’s actually more accurately described by the term ‘website builder’.
If you want to get even more specific, Wix can be described as a ‘What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG)’ website builder. This means it uses a drag-and-drop editor to help you easily create content without the need for any coding. It’s a completely different service from what you’d get with a full CMS like WordPress – so directly comparing the two offers little insight.
With that in mind, we circled back to BuiltWith for some more data on Wix. This online service is incredibly useful, as it lets you view the market share of various software based on specific criteria. For a perfect example, take a look at the ‘Simple Website Builder Usage Distribution on the Entire Internet’ category:
As you can see, Wix completely dominates this category – one that’s more relevant to the way it operates than a simple list of CMS platforms. A 37% market share means that it outranks Squarespace, Weebly, and the GoDaddy website builder. It’s also the second most popular website builder for the top 10k, top 100k, and top 1m sites on the internet.
Is Wix’s market share likely to keep growing?
We’re not fortune tellers, so it’s impossible to say for sure what will happen in the future. However, nothing in the way Wix’s market share has grown over the past few years suggests any sign of stopping.
In its first year (back in 2013), Wix held less than 0.1% of the CMS market share. By the start of 2016, it held a 0.2% share. That’s double the popularity in three years, which is impressive for a newcomer in a tough, crowded market.
During the following year, Wix’s market share hit 0.3% and by January 2018, Wix held 0.4% of the CMS market. This consistent but slow trend was bucked over the following year, however. As of January 2019, Wix surpassed the 1.0% market share threshold and it has now reached 1.3% as of the beginning of 2020. To put things in perspective, Wix’s popularity grew by more than 220% in less than two years.
For a clearer view of the process, you can refer to this growth table by W3Techs:
As the graph demonstrates, Wix has experienced consistent growth since its inception not too long ago. Plus, if the recent leap is anything to go by, Wix will continue to expand its market share at a rapid pace. It will be interesting to see where it’s at this time next year, but we have no doubt that Wix will have risen still higher on the charts.
How does Wix’s growth compare with its competitors?
At this point, it goes without saying that Wix’s market share is growing steadily. Yet, how does it look when compared to the popularity of its competitors?
If you look at the CMS growth data collected by W3Techs, you can see that several of the more popular platforms have actually experienced an overall decrease in market share recently. For example, from 2018 to 2020:
- Joomla’s market share decreased from 3.2% to 2.5%.
- Blogger’s didn’t show any signs of growth and stopped at 0.9%.
- Drupal’s market share decreased from 2.3% to 1.6%.
- Magento’s dropped from 1.2% to 0.8%.
Within the same time span, Wix leapt from 0.4% to 1.3%. So, although it doesn’t top the popularity charts, this platform is one of the clear leaders when it comes to overall growth in the website builders market. In some respects, this is more important than raw numbers, as it shows that there’s plenty of potential for continued expansion.
Of course, not all of the platforms we’ve mentioned are quite the same. We’ve already discussed the differences between Wix and general-purpose CMS options like Joomla and Drupal. Other popular platforms, such as Magento and Shopify, are specifically designed for building e-commerce stores.
So let’s compare Wix with its closest direct competitor: Squarespace. Both are popular easy-to-use website builders, which are suited to a wide range of website types. Therefore, we used Google Trends to put together a graph comparing the mentions of both platforms across the web:
Here, you can see the level of interest each platform has generated since the beginning of 2019. In that time, Wix has remained consistently ahead of Squarespace – and it looks set to continue that trend. If so, there’s a good chance that it will end up eclipsing Squarespace’s market share before too long.