The Third Most Popular CMS is....Website Tonight

I noticed something this week while looking at the latest CMS usage statistics from BuiltWith Trends that surprised me. BuiltWith Trends provides information on the usage of various technologies across the web – including CMS’s, – and it’s of little surprise that they have Wordpress up there at no#1 and Joomla! a little way behind in second. What came as a surprise to me was that up in third was a CMS called “Website Tonight”. That’s ahead of Drupal, which I had always considered one of the “Big Three”.

Perhaps tellingly, in separate statistics for the Top Million sites (according to data from Quantcast) it drops down to seventh, and out of the top ten CMS’s altogether when you get to the “top ten websites”.

I’ll be honest – I’d never heard of Website Tonight. On its inauspicious website, Website Tonight to be: “an Internet-based Web site creation tool that enables users to build and publish Web sites in a few simple steps. An easy-to-use turnkey solution, WebSite Tonight guides the user through the entire process of outlining, building, analyzing, optimizing, and, ultimately, publishing a Web site to the Internet.”. I suspect what’s key on this site is the button entitled “Become a Reseller” – presumably they provide white-label website creation tools for these “build your own website” websites. It does appear that, amongst others, the product is available as a service through the likes of GoDaddy. Either way, it’s a surprising statistic yet one which I don’t believe will affect my decision as to what technology to concentrate on for now – on my head be it!

If you happen to know any more about Website Tonight, do let me know in the comments.