Most popular website CMS platforms in digital health

What are the most popular website content management systems being used by leading digital health and healthcare tech companies? We wanted to use data to take a comprehensive view of the most commonly deployed platforms in the industry.

TLDR: We analyzed 600+ websites across digital health and ranked the most popular content management systems across startups and large organizations. You can see the full list here. WordPress and Webflow are the most popular choices, with Squarespace, Headless CMSs, and HubSpot being the next three most popular options.

Is there a best CMS?

With hundreds of CMS platforms available, it can be difficult for marketing teams to decide which one is best suited for their needs. As a digital agency for healthcare, we often get asked: what’s the best platform for companies who want to continue to build out their web presence, improve their content marketing efforts and deliver a cohesive customer experience across all of their users? Every company, team, and situation is unique, so we typically guide clients through the pros and cons of the top options and help them choose a platform that suits their specific business goals.

We wanted to go further than just relying on our experience in web design & development, and take a look at the digital health market landscape to benchmark our recommendations against real-world data.

To do this, we compiled a list of 600+ websites across digital health referencing the HLTH 2022 sponsors and then scanned each site to see if we could detect their content management system. We also tagged each company by deal/funding stage, to see if there were any interesting differences across startups or more established companies.

Top CMS Platform for Digital Health & Healthcare Tech Companies

‍

The results were interesting and clarified many of our assumptions. WordPress is the top platform by a wide margin with 42% of the sites running on it - and this remained steady across startups as well later-stage companies. In second place sits Webflow, lagging far behind at 15%.

The next batch averaged 5% adoption each - these seemed to all fit more specific use cases:

• Self-guided options catering to earlier-stage startups and solopreneurs (SquareSpace + Wix)
  ‍
• Headless CMS implementations for brands that may have more advanced tech stack & performance requirements
  ‍
• Teams looking to manage all of their marketing out of one system with HubSpot CMS

From there, the long tail of other platforms continue with each at 1% or less representation out of the total 40+ platforms we detected.

Let’s break down some of the top CMS platforms a little further.
‍

WordPress
‍

WordPress, which most people are familiar with at this point, is still the clear winner these days with almost half of all sites running the popular CMS platform.

WordPress is a free, open-source software that you can install on your own web host to create a website that’s 100% your own. It's been the fastest-growing content management system for 12 years in a row and is used on 63.8% of all sites using a content management system globally.

With a deep ecosystem of developers, designers and agencies that work have worked with WordPress for years, marketing teams don’t typically have to worry about struggling to find expert talent to build, optimize or maintain a WordPress site.

It also has a robust plug-in ecosystem that allows developers to quickly extend and customize the platform.

Wordpress is a blogging platform at its core, making it a popular choice for brands that are looking to build out a comprehensive content marketing strategy which may also need to serve different audiences across the healthcare ecosystem.

You’ll have to find your own hosting for a Wordpress site - but luckily there is a plethora of Wordpress-specific hosting options available for any size, team, and budget.

‍

Webflow
‍

Webflow is a visual web page editor and powerful CMS platform designed to accelerate development speed and help companies launch beautiful web experiences through an easy-to-use user interface. As a newer entrant into the CMS arena, Webflow brings a more innovative, forward-thinking approach to website design and development.

Early-stage startups often choose Webflow to launch their initial website presence as they scale and grow their marketing programs. There is a growing ecosystem of agencies and developers who advocate for Webflow’s visual page builder and no-code approach, with an increasing number of later-stage companies increasingly adopting the fast growing platform.

Webflow brings its own hosting, allowing you to launch and update your site with just a few clicks and without the need to configure any servers.

‍

Headless CMS
‍

The last popular option we’ll cover here is known as a Headless CMS. There are a few options in this category so we decided to group these together. Popular headless CMS platforms include Prismic and Contentful for the back-end content management and typically use front-end frameworks such as Next.js or Gatsby for the user interface. For complex web experiences with multiple data sources and dynamic content requirements, a headless CMS implementation offers a more sophisticated content management approach with the speed and performance of a modern-day consumer app experience.

One of the biggest advantages of a headless CMS implementation is the separation of the front-end experience from the back-end infrastructure. This gives developers and marketing teams tremendous flexibility and control over the user experience, while being able to integrate various content and data sources across their app ecosystem.

These tech stacks can be a bit more complex to manage and maintain, so aren’t always a fit depending on the web team’s size and in-house technical prowess.
‍

Wrapping up

Websites continue to be one of marketing’s most important assets for driving brand awareness, generating leads, and serving as a single source of truth for all other marketing programs and initiatives - especially in an industry like healthcare going through rapid digital transformation. 

The modern buyer/consumer has high expectations and wants to easily access the right information where and when they want. This means that having the right content management system and website experience is critical to staying ahead of these customer expectations.

With so many options, choosing the right CMS for your digital health marketing goals can be a tricky task. The key is understanding your unique requirements, vision, and goals, and knowing which features will help you achieve them. That’s why we wanted to share with you the top platforms across your peers. We hope you found it helpful.
‍

Questions or comments? Shoot us an email and let us know what you think. We’re here to help: hello@atomic.health.