English Local Government CMS

An analysis of CMS platform usage within English local government, specifically:

• County councils
• District councils
• Unitary authorities
• Metropolitan districts
• London boroughs

Contents

1. Background
2. CMS usage by platform
3. CMS usage by local authority
4. How we obtained the data
5. Related content

Background

We’ve been speaking with a couple of local authorities, with a view to improving their online self service function. We’re starting to see potential for our question answering and semantic seach platform within local government. We need to start thinking about systems integration.

We can ingest data from a public website, like a search engine but it’s not ideal. The optimal solution is direct CMS integration. So we thought it would be useful to know which content management systems are being used across local government. We did some research…

CMS usage by platform

Fortunately (for us) three content management systems dominate the local authority landscape:

• Jadu
• Drupal
• Umbraco

GOSS is a close contender, with Wordpress coming in at fifth place.

Drupal deserves a particular mention. A particular distribution, Local Government Drupal has been developed by and for councils in the UK. As of 28 June 2022, 28 councils are using local government drupal. It’s actively maintained and we expect to see more local authorities adopt the platform in the coming years.

CMS usage by authority

For reference, here’s a list of each English local authority, showing the content management system used. If you find something is inaccurate please let us know. Drop us an email: team@viko.co.uk

How we obtained the data

We collected the CMS data from a range of sources.

HTML tags

Fortunately, many cms platforms include a meta tag “generator” in their generated content. For example, looking at the source HTML for North Yorkshire County Council, we see this tag:

<meta name="generator" content="Drupal 9 (https://www.drupal.org)">

However, whilst many CMS platforms support the generator meta tag, developers of custom themes often forget (or choose) to exclude it.

Fingerprinting tools

WhatCMS is pretty accurate. It was our go to tool for sites that don’t have a generator tag.

WhatRuns is a chrome plugin that attempts to identify the tech stack used on a particular site. It gives reasonably accurate results.

News articles

Many councils publish news stories, covering the launch of a new website. The CMS is often mentioned. We were able to use our our question answering technology to ingest press releases and blog posts, then ask the question “which CMS is used by X?”

A revolutionary technique

Finally when all else failed, we fell back to the tried and tested approach - ask the council what they use! 😀

Related content

You may also be interested in our analysis of Scottish government CMS platforms and UK central government CMS platforms