Does Anyone Still Use Drupal?

It's a blunt question, and it deserves a straight answer: yes — but fewer sites than a decade ago, and the ones that remain are a very particular kind of site.

Let's not dance around the numbers. Drupal's share of the overall web has been shrinking for years. Around 2013 it held roughly 7% of the CMS market; today it powers somewhere around 1% of all websites, depending on whose tracker you read. Meanwhile WordPress kept growing and site builders like Wix and Squarespace ate the small-site market from the other side. If you only look at that chart, Drupal looks like a platform in retreat.

But "how many websites" is the wrong measurement for Drupal, and always was.

Who is actually still on it

Look at who runs Drupal today and a pattern jumps out immediately. The Government of Canada. The Australian Government, which built its whole-of-government platform (GovCMS) on it. The United Nations. Tesla. Pfizer, Bayer and Novartis. Cisco. The Weather Channel. Universities like Yale, Harvard and Princeton.

These are not organisations that keep software around out of nostalgia. They have security teams, procurement processes and compliance requirements, and they re-evaluate their platforms regularly. They stay on Drupal because it does things their sites genuinely need: strict permissions, editorial workflow, multilingual publishing, and content structured enough to feed apps and services beyond the website itself.

So the honest picture is this: Drupal lost the small-site market almost completely — and it was never really fighting for it. What's left is a smaller but denser core of large, complex, long-lived sites. One analysis of enterprise usage found Drupal unusually well represented among organisations with over 10,000 employees compared to typical CMS platforms. That's the shape of the platform now.

Is the project itself healthy?

A shrinking market share would worry me a lot more if development had stalled. It hasn't. Drupal ships major releases on a regular schedule — Drupal 11 is current — and the last few years brought real modernisation: better editor experience, cleaner developer tooling, and a push (through the Drupal CMS initiative) to make the platform friendlier out of the box for non-developers.

The community is smaller than it was at its peak, that's true. But it's professionalised. The people contributing today are largely doing it as part of their jobs at agencies and large organisations that depend on the platform. That tends to make development steadier, if less noisy.

The real problem isn't Drupal dying — it's old Drupal

Here's where the question "does anyone still use Drupal?" gets practical. A worrying share of the Drupal sites still online are running versions that stopped receiving security updates. Drupal 7 reached its end of life in January 2025 after fourteen years, and plenty of sites simply... kept running it.

Those sites are the source of most bad Drupal stories. They're slow to edit, expensive to maintain, and exposed to security problems that will never be patched. When someone says "Drupal feels ancient", they're almost always describing an old version, not the current platform — a bit like judging Windows by a machine still running Windows 7.

If you own a Drupal site and don't know your version, find out. It's the difference between "you're fine" and "you should be planning a migration this quarter".

So, should you worry?

If your organisation is on modern Drupal and the site does what you need: no. You're in the company of governments and global enterprises, the platform is actively developed, and there's a clear upgrade path ahead of you.

If you're on Drupal 7 or another end-of-life version: the platform isn't your problem — your version is. The good news is that migrating to modern Drupal keeps your content and gets you back onto supported ground.

And if you're choosing a CMS for a brand-new, simple site: honestly, Drupal probably shouldn't be on your shortlist, and the Drupal community itself would tell you the same.

People still use Drupal. Just not everyone — and at this point, that's by design more than by defeat.