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	Drupal CMS homepage?	Noteworthy Drupal sites and pages
1	Harvard University ^{United States}	97.6	No	Harvard Medical School Harvard Library Harvard Information Technology Harvard Admissions
2	Stanford University ^{United States}	90.0	No	All Stanford Departments Stanford University IT Stanford Libraries
3	Massachusetts Institute of Technology ^{United States}	88.1	No	MIT App Inventor MIT Medical MIT News
4	University of Cambridge ^{United Kingdom}	87.7	Yes	University of Cambridge \| Main website
5	University of Oxford ^{United Kingdom}	84.5	Yes	University of Oxford \| Main website
6	California Institute of Technology ^{United States}	82.4	No	Calitech Library
7	Princeton University ^{United States}	80.5	Yes	Princeton University \| Main website
8	University of California, Berkeley ^{United States}	80.0	No	The UC Berkley Library Berkeley International Office
9	University of Chicago ^{United States}	79.1	No	UChicago News The University of Chicago \| The Law School
10	Yale University ^{United States}	77.9	Yes	Yale University \| Main website
11	ETH Zurich ^Switzerland	76.2	No
12	Imperial College London ^{United Kingdom}	75.9	No	Lungs at Work
13	University College London ^{United Kingdom}	75.8	Yes	University College London \| Main website
14	University of Pennsylvania ^{United States}	75.6	Yes	University of Pennsylvania \| Main website
15	Cornell University ^{United States}	74.5	No	All Cornell Academic Departments Cornell Chronicle (News) Cornell University Library Weill Cornell Medicine
16	Johns Hopkins University ^{United States}	73.8	No	Johns Hopkins SAIS Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
17	Tsinghua University ^China	72.5	No	Tsinghua School of Finance
18	Peking University ^China	71.8	No	Peking University Library The Kavli Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics at Peking University
19	University of California, Los Angeles ^{United States}	71.6	No	UCLA Research Hammer Museum Academic Personnel UCLA Center for the Art of Performance
20	University of Toronto ^{United States}	69.8	Yes	University of Toronto \| Main website
21	University of Michigan-Ann Arbor ^{United States}	68.8	No	Michigan Medicine Michigan Law Michigan Library
22	University of Edinburgh ^{United Kingdom}	68.2	Yes	University of Edinburgh \| Main website
23	New York University ^{United States}	67.5	No	NYU Law NYU Stern (School of Business)
24	Northwestern University ^{United States}	67.1	No
25	University of Tokyo ^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	UC San Diego \| Jacobs School of Engineering UC San Diego \| Department of NanoEngineering
27	University of Melbourne ^Australia	65.3	No
28	Duke University ^{United States}	64.9	No	Duke University \| School of Medicine Duke Health Referring Physicians
29	University of Washington ^{United States}	64.5	No	Over 100+ Drupal pages
30	Nanyang Technological University ^Singapore	64.1	No
31	University of Hong Kong ^{Hong Kong}	63.9	No	HKU Admissions Office HKU Taught Postgraduate Admissions HKU Graduate School
32	King's College London ^{United Kingdom}	63.9	No
33	PSL University ^France	63.7	Yes	Université PSL \| Main website
34	University of Manchester ^{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	UBC \| Information Technology
37	McGill University ^Canada	61.3	Yes	McGill University \| Main website
38	Fudan University ^Japan	61.2	No
39	Kyoto University ^Japan	61.2	Yes	Kyoto University \| Main website
40	Zhejiang University ^China	60.7	No
41	University of Sydney ^Australia	60.4	No	The University of Sydney \| Centre for Veterinary Education
42	Shanghai Jiao Tong University ^China	60.2	No
43	University of Queensland ^Australia	59.8	Yes	University of Queensland \| Main website
44	Université Paris-Saclay ^France	59.7	Yes	Université Paris-Saclay \| Main website
45	Seoul National University ^Korea	59.6	No	SNU \| Open Courseware
46	Australian National University ^Australia	59.5	Yes	Australian National University \| Main website
47	University of New South Wales ^Australia	58.6	Yes	University of New South Wales \| Main website
48	Columbia University ^{United States}	58.3	Yes	Columbia University \| Main website
49	National University of Singapore ^Singapore	58.2	No	NUS News
50	University of Texas at Austin ^{United States}	58.1	Yes	University of Texas at Austin \| Main website

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):

Times Higher Education (THE)
Quacquarelli Symonds (QS)
Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU)

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):
1. University of Oxford
2. Harvard University
3. University of Cambridge
4. Stanford University
5. 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 [email protected]