UK University Web Content Management Systems

UK university team discussing a content management system

Article, data and chart updated July 2019

Web Content Management System Suppliers to UK Universities

As UK higher education websites prepare for the clearing onslaught we’ve taken a look under the cover to see what systems are supporting those websites.

We’ve re-run our web estate registry application’s content management system (CMS) detection module over the UK’s 163 higher education websites.

We found UK universities use 25 different web content management systems, with 4% of institutions relying on an in-house solution. For the UK’s 163 publicly funded higher education institutions we were able to unambiguously resolve the main website CMS in 158 instances. [We are collecting the missing data].

Eight content management system suppliers (including in-house solutions) support digital marketing and content publishing on the main websites at 80% of the UK’s higher education institutions.

The balance of institutions deploys 18 different CMSs to manage their web content. Unlike the US, we have yet to see institutions adopt cloud-based website building solutions such as Squarespace, Weebly or Wix.

We’ve summarised the institution-level detail by supplier. The chart shows the relative percentage of UK institution’s that have implemented each supplier’s CMS. In other words, 23.4% of the 158 institutions for which we have data have implemented TerminalFour:

 

UK University CMS Market Share Data

We have only checked the CMS for each institution’s main website. Individual institutions can have hundreds of other sites, sub-sites and microsites. And, most subsidiary websites exist to publish content rather than work as digital marketing machines. As a result, these sites use content focused CMSs such as WordPress, rather than full digital experience platforms.

It would be misleading to extrapolate the chart’s data into overall CMS market share estimates for the thousands of higher education websites spread across UK university web estates.

You can view a gallery of the home pages these systems generate in our post: UK Higher Education Homepage Collection.

If you have observations, comments or feedback about the data, how we collected it or want to see the underlying detail, please be in touch.

 

 

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Blog photo image: unsplash.com / pexels.com