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How many Drupal sites are there in the UK?

How many Drupal sites are there in the UK?

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Blog © BrightLemon ™ web design london
4 Oct 2010 | by Edward Davies

For a number of reasons, we have been collecting some Drupal data which shows or at least indicates how many Drupal sites exist in the UK. By investigating such a figure, we noticed there is not much data available on how many Drupal sites exist and if there is any, it’s based on estimates.

So, true to Drupal research form, all the information discussed here is purely an estimate, which has been derived from other estimates – so please take into consideration that these results are based on fragile foundations. However, we invite people to either submit suggestions, links or statistical information which will assist us in our research. Or, continue the challenge and take on your own investigations, using our information as a platform to work from.

With the data which was available to us, we had to divide this task into three separate stages.

 

Stage 1 – How many Drupal sites are there?

 

The most stable data in support of this question would be Dries Buytaert’s yearly download statistics, however these only represent the downloads and not live sites - also Dries has only published these statistics up to 2008, making this data obsolete.

So for this question, we turned to somebody else’s research , an article by Engine Industries which is titled How Many Websites Use Drupal? This investigation produced a figure for existing Drupal sites which has been commonly referenced throughout the web, including Wikipedia and Drupal.org. It seems like the most significant investigation completed in this field; as it takes into consideration download statistics, market share, search results and CMS competitors.

They estimate 7.19 million Drupal sites exist. For more details on this figure, view the article here.

 

Stage 2 – How many Drupal sites exist in Europe?

 

How many drupal sites are there?Fortunately, we have been given access to some new data. This graph represents the most popular continents Drupal is being distributed to.

However, this data does not represent a crawl of the whole web. Currently this includes the crawl so far of 435485 domains running Drupal, so once again we must put emphasis on the reliability of this information.

But presume this trend continued once all the Drupal domains had been crawled, we can then apply the European percentage of 28.2% to the 7.19 million figure mentioned in stage 1.

We estimate 2.02 million Drupal sites exist in Europe.

 

Stage 2 – How many Drupal sites exist in the UK?

 

How many websites use Drupal?Again, we are fortunate enough to have received some information on the distribution of Drupal via geolocation - which includes a percentage for Great Britian.

Once again, we must outline that this data is not complete and represents the crawl so far as 435485 Drupal domains.

However if we now apply the Great Britain percentage of 4% to the amount of European Drupal sites, we should get a very rough outline of how many Drupal sites exist in the UK.

We estimate 80, 800 Drupal sites exist in the UK.

Do you regard this as a close estimate, or do you think this is way of the actual figure? Contact us with your opinion.

 

Conclusion

 

We understand that the theory behind this investigation is supported by half complete research, estimates and third party investigations, but it does provide us with a real baseline figure which indicates an obvious growth in Drupal usage on a worldwide scale.

 

References

 

 

 

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