How The Top 50 Universities use Drupal CMS
Higher education websites (99% of the time) contain hundreds of pages with varying levels of user permissions, multiple branching departments, and various unique pages for research, news, events, and so on.
With these requirements, it's important to choose the right website builder or content management system (CMS). The CMS should not only meet the standard requirements of a content-heavy university website, but also be able to scale quickly as the institution grows over time.
This article answers that question:
What is the best CMS platform / website builder for a university?
In pursuit of finding an unbiased answer, we compiled the world’s top 50 universities and found their preferred web builder.
Key finding: Drupal is the most used website builder among the top 50 universities.
Since Xenyo is a Drupal agency, we decided to tailor the columns of our findings to Drupal.
We did this by:
- Adding a “Noteworthy Drupal Sites and Pages” column
- Writing Drupal-specific findings
- Asking if the university's site is built with Drupal, rather than citing a specific CMS / framework
You can view our methodology and findings at the bottom of the page.
Global University Ranking 2023
| Rank | University | Score | Is it Drupal? | Noteworthy Drupal sites and pages |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | United States | 97.6 | No | |
| 2 | United States | 90.0 | No | |
| 3 | Massachusetts Institute of Technology United States | 88.1 | No | |
| 4 | United Kingdom | 87.7 | Yes | University of Cambridge | Main website |
| 5 | United Kingdom | 84.5 | Yes | University of Oxford | Main website |
| 6 | California Institute of Technology United States | 82.4 | No | Calitech Library |
| 7 | United States | 80.5 | Yes | Princeton University | Main website |
| 8 | University of California, Berkeley United States | 80.0 | No | |
| 9 | United States | 79.1 | No | |
| 10 | United States | 77.9 | Yes | |
| 11 | Switzerland | 76.2 | No | |
| 12 | United Kingdom | 75.9 | No | |
| 13 | United Kingdom | 75.8 | Yes | |
| 14 | United States | 75.6 | Yes | University of Pennsylvania | Main website |
| 15 | United States | 74.5 | No | |
| 16 | United States | 73.8 | No | |
| 17 | China | 72.5 | No | |
| 18 | China | 71.8 | No | The Kavli Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics at Peking University |
| 19 | University of California, Los Angeles United States | 71.6 | No | |
| 20 | United States | 69.8 | Yes | |
| 21 | University of Michigan-Ann Arbor United States | 68.8 | No | |
| 22 | United Kingdom | 68.2 | Yes | |
| 23 | United States | 67.5 | No | |
| 24 | United States | 67.1 | No | |
| 25 | Japan | 67.0 | No | Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe |
| 26 | University of California, San Diego United States | 66.0 | No | |
| 27 | Australia | 65.3 | No | |
| 28 | United States | 64.9 | No | |
| 29 | United States | 64.5 | No | |
| 30 | Nanyang Technological University Singapore | 64.1 | No | |
| 31 | Hong Kong | 63.9 | No | |
| 32 | United Kingdom | 63.9 | No | |
| 33 | France | 63.7 | Yes | |
| 34 | United Kingdom | 62.6 | No |
|
| 35 | Technical University of Munich Germany | 62.5 | No | TUM University Library |
| 36 | University of British Columbia United Kingdom | 62.2 | No | |
| 37 | Canada | 61.3 | Yes | |
| 38 | Japan | 61.2 | No | |
| 39 | Japan | 61.2 | Yes | |
| 40 | China | 60.7 | No | |
| 41 | Australia | 60.4 | No | |
| 42 | China | 60.2 | No | |
| 43 | Australia | 59.8 | Yes | |
| 44 | France | 59.7 | Yes | |
| 45 | Korea | 59.6 | No | |
| 46 | Australian National University Australia | 59.5 | Yes | |
| 47 | Australia | 58.6 | Yes | |
| 48 | United States | 58.3 | Yes | |
| 49 | National University of Singapore Singapore | 58.2 | No | |
| 50 | United States | 58.1 | Yes |
Methodology
1. Deciding which University Ranking System to use
The top 50 university rankings are not set in stone. Three in particular are well-known in the industry (as of 2023):
All of which are based on quantifiable measurements such as research and citations.
To learn more about these and other less popular systems, see our article World University Rankings | Explained.
Since there is no clear winner in terms of reliability, we have decided to combine all three systems while keeping the numbers unartibrary and based on actual data.
Because of this, we will not be including universities below ARWU’s top 100 list, since the scores of 101+ are not in the official ARWU website. Xenyo will not give an arbitrary score now will it consider the average of THE and QS for the sake of inclusion.
2. Researching CMS used by university websites and pages
Xenyo uses various tools and methods for detecting the CMS used for each univerity website. Some of these tools include browser extensions like Wappalyzer and BuiltWith for quick CMS checking. We check noteworthy pages such as homepages, libraries, news, departments, and so on.
When these digital tools are exhausted with no results, we check page codes, admin panels, robots.txt files, and more. Xenyo only has access to data that are publicly visible.
Findings
Regarding the Top 50 University List, we found that:
- There are 148 unique universities on all three top 100 lists (THE, QS, ARWU)
- Only 60 universities made it on all three top 100 lists
- 5 Universities are consistently within the top 5 of all lists (in no particular order):
- University of Oxford
- Harvard University
- University of Cambridge
- Stanford University
- Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Regarding Noteworthy Drupal websites, we found that:
- Drupal CMS usage varies greatly from 1 website to 100+ websites
- 82% or 41 out of 50 universities has at least 1 Drupal page or website
- 36% or 18 out of 50 university use Drupal as their main website’s CMS
Regarding Website Builders used by the Top 50 Universities, we found that:
- Drupal is the most used website builder for the global top 50 universities, accounting for 36% of all university websites
- WordPress is the 2nd most used website builder for the top 50 universities, accounting for for 8% of all university websites.
- Adobe Experience Manager is the 3rd most used website builder for the top 50 universities, accounting for 6% of the main websites.
We made a similar list for Hong Kong Universities
Interested in seeing the same ranking system for Hong Kong universities? Xenyo also makes a list at Hong Kong Universities & Drupal CMS.
Did we miss anything?
Know something we don't? Help make this study more accurate by emailing us at info@xenyo.com