It’s rare to find a product category ripe with options but dominated by a single brand. If the only content management system (CMS) that you have heard of is WordPress, you are a part of the majority.
WordPress, with 58.7% of the sites whose CMS is known, is by far the most popular option around the world. Joomla, once its closest open-source rival, now accounts for a very small slice of the pie and has been passed by several hosted platforms. It is natural, then, to question the need for going through these Joomla statistics.
They are important to understanding why Joomla (stylized as Joomla!) continues to maintain its fair share of dedicated users and developers. As we elaborate below, Joomla offers distinct advantages over WordPress (or other CMSs). Knowing about them helps you, the end-user, to weigh the options available, which is why we took our time to collect more information about this potent CMS.
After all, understanding it better will help you choose the most suitable Joomla host from among the seven specialized reviews we have here at Webtribunal.
Check this out:
- Joomla powers about 1.1% of all websites, and 1.6% of those running a known CMS.
- BuiltWith tracks 803,058 live Joomla sites, against roughly 3.09 million that have moved off it.
- That makes Joomla the fifth largest CMS, behind WordPress, Shopify, Wix and Squarespace.
- Among business-oriented sites, 9% opted for Joomla when Joomla last published the figure.
- About 780 contributors had worked on the code as of 2021.
- Joomla 3 still runs about half of all Joomla sites, across six major versions in the wild.
Along with answering common questions related to the benefits of using Joomla, these statistics also provide relevant information on Joomla’s worldwide usage, its history, and its strong developer community.
Let’s jump right in!
Joomla Usage Statistics
Joomla’s position has changed materially since this page was first written, so the usage figures come first and carry their measurement dates. Two notes before the numbers. W3Techs and BuiltWith recrawl continuously, so every figure here is a point-in-time reading rather than a fixed total. And they measure different things: W3Techs reports shares of the sites it surveys, while BuiltWith counts detected sites.
1. Joomla powers about 1.1% of all websites.
(Source: W3Techs, September 25, 2026)
That is the share of all websites, not of websites running a CMS. The figure was 2.2% when this page previously reported it, so Joomla’s share of the open web has roughly halved. This number updates daily and will drift.
2. Joomla’s share among sites with a known CMS is 1.6%.
(Source: W3Techs, September 25, 2026)
Restricting the denominator to sites whose content management system is identifiable raises Joomla’s share, as you would expect, but not by much. The previous figure on this page was 3.5%.
3. Joomla is no longer the second most-used CMS.
(Source: W3Techs, September 25, 2026)
Among sites with a known CMS, WordPress holds 58.7%, Shopify 7.8%, Wix 6.2%, Squarespace 3.6% and Joomla 1.6%. Joomla did hold second place for several years, and this page said so for a long time, but that ranking is now history rather than a current fact. The platforms that passed it are hosted commercial products rather than open-source rivals, which is its own story about where website building went.
4. BuiltWith tracks 803,058 live Joomla websites.
(Source: BuiltWith, checked September 2026)
It also records 358,168 redirects and roughly 3.09 million sites that used Joomla historically but no longer do. This page previously cited more than 2.5 million live sites from late-2018 figures, so the honest reading is a decline of roughly two-thirds in Joomla’s live footprint, not a refresh with a bigger number. BuiltWith’s crawler re-indexes continuously, so treat the exact counts as approximate.
5. Joomla 3 still runs about half of all Joomla sites.
(Source: W3Techs, September 25, 2026)
The version landscape now spans six major releases: Joomla 3 at about 52.2%, Joomla 5 at 20.6%, Joomla 6 at 8.7%, Joomla 4 at 8.2%, Joomla 2 at 6.0% and Joomla 1 at 4.3%. When this page was written there were effectively two versions in play, with Joomla 4 still in alpha at 0.1%.
The interesting part is the tail. More than one in ten Joomla sites still run version 1 or 2, both long past end of life, and a majority sit on version 3 rather than the current releases. Slow migration is the normal pattern for self-hosted software, and it is also a security consideration for anyone inheriting an older Joomla site. These percentages update daily.
6. Over 9% of business websites used Joomla.
(Source: Joomla, year not stated)
Joomla has historically been stronger among business-focused sites than its overall share suggests. We have kept this as dated context rather than a current benchmark, because the original source does not give a year and we could not establish when it was measured.
Key Joomla Advantages
The items in this section are feature and opinion claims rather than measurements, and most predate the current major versions. They are presented as dated context: a capability that was true of Joomla 3 may have changed by Joomla 6, and a comparative judgment made years ago is not a current verdict.
7. Joomla won the CMS Critic People’s Choice Award for Best Free CMS four years in a row.
(Source: Joomla, historical)
Joomla dominated that category for several years and has won close to 20 major awards and recognitions over its lifetime. The “four years in a row” claim is itself dated, and we have not confirmed Joomla’s current standing in the award.
8. Reported advantages include user management, non-standard content and multilingual support.
(Source: Kinsta, historical)
Joomla users have long singled out its user and permission management, its flexibility in displaying content that does not fit a standard blog structure, and its built-in multilingual handling. This is a feature comparison from an earlier period rather than a current assessment of the competitive landscape.
9. Joomla offered over 70 translation packs for the core.
(Source: Joomla, year not stated)
Multilingual capability is part of the Joomla core rather than an add-on, which is one of the clearer distinctions from WordPress. The pack count is undated in the original source.
10. Thousands of free and paid templates exist for Joomla.
(Source: Joomla, year not stated)
No exact count is possible, since templates are added continuously on the official site and by independent developers. The claim is general enough that it likely still holds, but it is undated.
11. Joomla offered SEO-friendly functions natively.
(Source: CMS Critic, historical)
Core SEO controls ship with the CMS rather than requiring an extension. Native features change across major versions, so this is dated rather than a statement about Joomla 6.
12. Joomla shipped with built-in performance features.
(Source: Website Setup, historical)
Caching and Gzip compression can be enabled from the administrator interface without an extension. Again, a claim about the version current at the time of writing.
13. Joomla was assessed as more secure than WordPress out of the box.
(Source: Themeisle, historical assessment)
The reasoning was that Joomla ships with options to force connections over SSL and to enable two-factor authentication, where WordPress required plugins for both. This is a comparative judgment made at a particular time, not a present-tense fact, and both platforms have moved since.
14. Notable Joomla sites are showcased at Joomla.org.
(Source: Joomla)
The showcase section of the official site remains the reliable place to see what the CMS is being used for. We have removed this page’s old list of named brands, because sites migrate platforms and the list was never re-verified.
15. Joomla was recommended for building social networks and membership sites.
(Source: Website Setup, historical)
Its built-in handling of users, groups and permissions made it a common choice for membership sites, forums and community features. That is a recommendation from an earlier period rather than a ranking of today’s options.
16. Joomla offers blogging capabilities through extensions.
(Source: Joomla Beginner, historical)
Joomla is not primarily a blogging platform, but K2, EasyBlog, ZOO, RSBlog and CJBlog have all been used to add blogging features. Extension availability changes, so check any of these are still maintained before relying on them.
17. VirtueMart was the most popular Joomla e-commerce extension.
(Source: Joomla Beginner, historical)
WordPress has a substantial lead in e-commerce, but Joomla has had credible options, of which VirtueMart was the most widely used at the time of writing. The “most popular” part would need re-verifying before being treated as current.
Infographic
General Joomla Statistics
Background on where Joomla came from and how it is built.
18. Joomla has existed in its current form since 2005.
(Source: Wikipedia)
It began as a fork of Mambo, an older open-source CMS that wound up in 2008, and it is backed by Open Source Matters. This is a fixed historical fact.
19. Joomla is a community-driven, open-source CMS.
(Source: Joomla project structure)
Development is carried out by volunteers rather than a single company, which describes Joomla’s organizational structure rather than a figure that ages.
20. Joomla’s code had 46,000+ commits from 780+ contributors as of 2021.
(Source: community development snapshot, 2021)
This is a dated snapshot of the GitHub repository and its contributor count, kept as historical context because no current like-for-like Git contributor count was verified. One caution worth stating: Joomla’s volunteer portal lists a much smaller number of active volunteers, but that counts a different population, so it is not evidence that code contributors fell from 780 to a fraction of that.
21. The Joomla global community held more than 35 major events in 2018.
(Source: Joomla, 2018)
JoomlaDays and JoomlaCamps ran across Italy, Germany and many other countries that year. The figure is correctly dated to 2018 and has not been updated.
Key Joomla Takeaways
The honest summary is that Joomla has contracted. Its share of all websites has roughly halved since this page last reported it, BuiltWith now records more than three times as many sites that have left Joomla as sites still running it, and the platforms that overtook it are hosted commercial products rather than open-source competitors.
That is not the same as a dead project. Joomla still ships major releases, versions 5 and 6 both have meaningful adoption, and the things it has always done well, multilingual content in the core, granular user and permission management, and flexibility with content that does not fit a blog structure, remain real reasons to choose it for a particular job.
What has changed is the shape of the decision. Joomla is now a considered choice for specific requirements rather than the obvious runner-up to WordPress, and anyone inheriting an existing Joomla site should check which version it runs before anything else: more than one in ten are still on releases long past end of life.
