Magento Used By 2.8% of All Websites According to W3Techs
According to data collected by W3Techs, the Magento ecommerce platform is used by 2.8 per cent of all websites from which they have been able to collect data; or 1.2 per cent of all websites, if websites for which the survey does not have CMS data are included.
The growth curve for Magento has been fairly steady, with usage increasing by 20 per cent over the past 12 months. The online shopping solution is particularly popular with websites that receive a moderately high level of traffic. Webmasters who run lower traffic sites have tended to favour Joomla, while the higher traffic sites have leaned towards Drupal.
WordPress is still the CMS of choice for the majority of small and medium-sized websites and powers a healthy percentage of high-traffic websites too. Since it is so easily extensible and able to serve as both a blog and an online store or a membership site, its popularity makes sense.
Hugely Popular in The Ecommerce World
The 1.2 per cent figure may not seem impressive at first glance, but when you narrow down the websites under consideration to the top one million sites according to Alexa ranking, then the picture is really quite impressive. As of 2014, Magento powered 26 per cent of the ecommerce sites ranked in the top one million websites, far ahead of WooCommerce, Prestashop, OpenCart, Virtuemart, Shopify, osCommerce, ZenCart and BigCommerce.
According to the annual survey conducted by Tom Robert Shaw, Magento has been the most popular ecommerce platform for four successive years. While the number of ecommerce sites in existence is increasing dramatically, the split between the most popular platforms has largely remained the same. Magento enjoys a similar market share to the next three open source ecommerce platforms combined.
Could There Be a Challenger?
Very few markets stand still. WooCommerce is certainly growing in popularity as the developers add new features and the community produces a wealth of themes and plugins for the platform. However, Magento has maturity, stability and a substantial selection of existing, proven features on its side, in addition to the same open source extensibility as its rivals. It also enjoys the backing of a heavyweight developer in the form of eBay. It’s hard to deny these advantages and thus highly unlikely that any of the alternatives will get the traction required to overtake Magento in the foreseeable future.
Magento isn’t kind to the average, non-code-savvy business owner who wants to run an online store out-of-the-box. There are simpler, more forgiving options, but there’s a reason it’s way ahead in front powering 26% of ecommerce websites – because it comes packed with the tools to grow and manage your online business and has a large developer base with thousands of readily available plugins and extensions.
Radweb have been crafting Magento websites since the platform’s earliest releases. We can help. From consultancy and design to templating and extension development – we have been building fast, secure and scalable Magento websites for a wide variety of customers over the last 8 years. Give us a call if we can help you get started, or move to Magento.