We analysed the top 50 charity websites in the UK to see what content management system they use. The results show a clear front-runner.
Content management systems (CMS) allow digital teams to control, alter and expand their websites. There are loads of them out there, from open-source tools to enterprise systems with hefty licencing costs. They all have their strengths and weaknesses, but what content management sysems are the most favoured among major charities in the UK?
To find out, we analysed the websites of the 50 largest charities in the UK by revenue, to uncover what CMS they use.
As you can see in the chart below, there’s a wide variety of content management systems being used by the UK’s top charities.
Although there are twelve different systems here, it’s clear that Drupal stands out by a considerable margin as the most used, followed by WordPress and Sitecore.
Drupal
Used by 38% of the top 50 charities in the UK, Drupal is the clear market leader in powering big, complex websites for non-profit organisations. Major charity websites powered by Drupal include UNICEF, Cancer Research UK, WWF, WaterAid and many more.
Drupal’s major benefits include being open source, which means no licencing costs, and its customisability. For more information on the pros and cons of Drupal, see our article on the best CMS for large websites.
Sitecore
Sitecore comes out as the joint second most popular CMS for large charities, tied with WordPress. Sitecore is a ‘digital experience platform’, which brings together a whole suite of tools such as analytics, customer data management, email marketing and content management. It’s powerful, but it’s also complex and expensive.
Using Sitecore requires paying their licensing costs, which are substantial. The exact pricing will depend on your website’s size and needs, but according to publicly available data, the average annual cost of a Sitecore licence is $115,000 per year. With charities’ budgets under pressure, such costs can be hard to justify.
WordPress
Powering 14% of top 50 charity websites, WordPress is also a popular option. Like Drupal, it’s open source, and therefore has no licencing costs. It has a huge developer community and provides a vast range of plugins to choose from. However, it’s designed around the needs of smaller websites like blogs, and therefore might not be suitable for the needs of major charity websites.
WordPress powers a whopping 58% of small charity websites (defined as charities whose income is under £100,000 per year), but just 14% of the top 50 charities websites. This is because it’s less optimised for the needs of larger, more complex organisations.
Anyone considering WordPress for their website should read the latest in the ongoing battle within the WordPress community, between the co-creator of WordPress and WP Engine, which hosts websites built on WordPress. The two sides are locked in a legal battle, accusing each other of trademark infringement, extortion, and abuse of power. For more information on the situation, read this write-up in TechCrunch.
The fight has the WordPress community worried. Senior contributors to WordPress published an open letter objecting to the continued opaqueness of the WordPress governance model and calling for governance changes, which you can read here. The furore caused WP Engine to be banned from accessing Wordpress’s, consequently breaking a lot of sites, and leaving them vulnerable to cyber-attacks.
Other CMS
Between them, Drupal, WordPress and Sitecore power two-thirds of the top 50 charity websites. The remaining 33% are powered by a range of different systems, such as Optimizely, Umbraco, Wagtail, Gatsby and Adobe Experience Manager. We won’t discuss all of these systems in detail here, but we’ve assessed several of these systems in our article on the best CMS for large websites, which dissects their pros and cons.
If you work at a charity and are considering changing your CMS as part of a website re-build project, we’d love to chat. We’ve built websites for many leading UK charities, such as The Children’s Society, Cancer Grand Challenges, and Lloyd’s Register Foundation.
When it comes to your CMS, we take the time to understand the common needs of internal, non-technical users in the organisation. We then modify the authoring environment to make sure you have everything you need and remove anything you don’t. This means you can get all the benefits of a powerful CMS without being overwhelmed by complexity.
Email [email protected] to discuss how we could support your next website project.