Museum Website Design: What the World’s Most-Visited Museums Get Right

Good museum website design does one job before any other: it gets people through the door. Everything else, from the collection online to membership and the shop, matters, but the homepage of a major museum is first of all a visitor-information page with a beautiful picture on it. The best museum websites make the next visit easy, then make the collection easy to explore, and only then ask for money.

We checked that against the homepages of the most-visited museums in the world and in the United States, 95 institutions in all, on 24 October 2026. We recorded what each homepage puts in front of visitors and what platform each site is built on. Here is what the leaders have in common, and what it means if you are planning a museum website of your own.

How we studied the world’s top museum websites

We started from two public rankings: Wikipedia’s lists of the most-visited museums in the world and the most-visited museums in the United States. Both compile attendance figures from The Art Newspaper’s annual survey, the TEA Global Experience Index and the museums’ own reports. Together they name 98 institutions. After removing a duplicate and two entries without a verifiable official website, we had 95 museums, from the Louvre and the British Museum to the Perot Museum in Dallas and the Museum of Flight in Seattle.

For each one we loaded the official homepage, taken from Wikidata and corrected by hand where it had moved. We then recorded two things. First, the platform, identified from fingerprints in the page code and the server’s response, such as Drupal’s settings script, WordPress’s wp-content paths or the image addresses of a hosted CMS. Second, ten homepage elements a visitor would look for. Sixteen sites refused automated checks or could not be reached, so the platform figures cover 79 sites and the homepage figures cover the 72 we could read in full. The full method and the dataset are at the end of the article.

What the best museum websites put on the homepage

The pattern is consistent across countries and collection types. The visit comes first. Seventy-eight percent of homepages have a “Visit” or “Plan your visit” link in the main navigation. Seventy-four percent have a ticket or booking link there too, usually as the only coloured button in the header. Most of the homepages without one belong to museums with free general admission, such as the British Museum, the National Gallery in London, the National Gallery of Art in Washington and the Smithsonian museums. Three in four also show opening hours on the homepage itself, often as a single “open today” line, because “is it open?” is the question most visitors arrive with.

The collection is the second job. Eighty-six percent link to the collection from the homepage, and 88% offer site search. For a museum, search is as much a collection tool as a navigation aid: visitors look for a painting, an artist or a dinosaur by name.

Support comes third, but it is almost always there. Seventy-five percent of homepages link to membership or donations, and 58% have a newsletter sign-up, usually in the footer. Among the US museums in the set, the share with a membership or donate link rises to 31 of 32 homepages.

Languages are rarer than you might expect. Only 18% of homepages declare two or more language versions to search engines with hreflang tags, even among museums that receive millions of international visitors a year. If your audience is international, declare those versions properly so Google shows each visitor the right one; our guide to Drupal multilingual sites covers how.

Eight museum website design lessons from the data

1. Answer “can I visit today?” without a click. Show today’s hours on the homepage and keep the “Visit” link first in the navigation.
2. One ticket button, always in the same place. Put it in the header, in a colour used for nothing else. If entry is free, say so in the same spot, so visitors stop looking for a ticket.
3. Make the collection one click away. A “Collection” link in the main menu and a search box that covers objects, artists and pages, not just news.
4. Treat the homepage as a programme, not a brochure. Lead with what is on now: current exhibitions, this week’s events, the next family day. Visitors come back for what is new.
5. Ask for support once, clearly. A membership or donate link in the header or footer on every page beats a pop-up on arrival.
6. Build accessibility into the templates. A skip link, alt text on every image and keyboard-friendly menus cost very little at design stage and a lot to retrofit.
7. Declare your languages. If you publish in more than one language, add hreflang tags so search engines can send each visitor to the right version.
8. Design for the phone in a gallery. Opening hours, maps, audio guides and floor plans are read on a phone, often inside the building. Check them on a phone before launch.

Which museum CMS do the world’s biggest museums use?

Of the 79 sites we could read, 22 run on Drupal, the largest group we could identify. They include the British Museum, the Musée d’Orsay, the National Gallery of Art, the Science Museum in London, LACMA, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Denver Art Museum, The Broad and Royal Museums Greenwich. In the United States the share is higher still: 16 of the 35 US museums we could read run Drupal. That includes all three Smithsonian museums that let us in: the National Museum of Natural History, the National Air and Space Museum and the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

WordPress is second, with 13, among them the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, the National Gallery of Victoria and the Houston Museum of Natural Science. Six sites use a hosted headless CMS: MoMA and the Philadelphia Museum of Art on Sanity, Crystal Bridges on Contentful, the Getty on Contentstack, and the Uffizi and the Art Gallery of New South Wales on DatoCMS. Four use enterprise platforms: the Metropolitan Museum of Art on Sitecore, and the Natural History Museum in London, National Gallery Singapore and the Vatican Museums on Adobe Experience Manager. Four more run other open-source systems, TYPO3 at the Centre Pompidou and the Kunsthistorisches Museum and Umbraco at the National Gallery in London and the Fernbank Museum.

The remaining 30 are custom builds or sites that do not reveal their CMS. That group includes many state-run museums in China, Japan, Korea and Taiwan, and institutions such as the Rijksmuseum, the Van Gogh Museum, the V&A and the Whitney. Treat the platform shares as a floor: some of these 30 sites will be running one of the systems above behind a custom front end.

Two more findings stand out. Decoupled front ends are now common at the top. Nineteen of the 79 sites render through a JavaScript framework such as Next.js, Nuxt or Gatsby, with a separate CMS supplying the content. Four of those use Drupal as that back end: the Louvre, the Field Museum, the Cleveland Museum of Art and The Huntington. Versions vary. Of the 17 Drupal sites that reveal their version, eight run Drupal 11 and six Drupal 10. Two still report Drupal 8, which reached end of life in November 2021, and one shows the markup of Drupal 7, which left community support in January 2025. If your own site is on Drupal 7, our Drupal 7 to 11 migration checklist is the place to start.

Choosing a CMS for a museum website

The data explains why big museums cluster on Drupal and on headless systems: their content is structured. A museum website is a set of linked records, not a pile of pages. An exhibition links to the artists and objects in it, the events that go with it, the gallery it is in and the dates it runs. A collection record may arrive every night from a collections management system. Curators, marketing, education and the shop all publish, with different permissions and someone approving their work. Drupal handles content types, relationships, roles, editorial workflow and translation in core, which is why it fits that shape well.

That does not make it the right choice for every museum. A small or single-venue museum with a part-time web editor and no online collection is often better served by a well-built WordPress site, and should spend the difference on photography and content. A museum with a strong in-house front-end team and a design-led brand may choose a hosted headless CMS and build its own front end, as MoMA (Sanity) and the Getty (Contentstack) have. Enterprise platforms make sense mainly when a museum already uses that vendor’s marketing tools across a larger organisation. Whatever you choose, ticketing, membership and collections systems usually connect through their own APIs or embedded widgets. Check those integrations before you check anything else.

Accessibility: a deadline for public museums

Accessibility is also a legal question for many museums. In the United States, museums run by a state, county or city are covered by the Department of Justice’s ADA Title II rule for websites. It requires WCAG 2.1 level AA, and after an interim final rule in April 2026 the deadlines are 26 April 2027 for public entities serving 50,000 people or more and 26 April 2028 for smaller ones. Private nonprofit museums are not covered by that rule, but they face the same expectations from visitors, funders and, under Title III of the ADA, the courts.

Our checks are basic, not a full audit, and they still found gaps at some of the best-funded institutions in the world. Thirty-eight percent of homepages had no skip-to-content link, which keyboard and screen-reader users rely on to bypass the menu. Eighteen of 72 had at least one image with no alt attribute at all. US museums did better on both counts: 25 of 32 had a skip link, and only 5 of 32 had an image with no alt attribute. On a new build, accessibility is a design and template decision. Set the standard in the brief and test with real assistive technology before launch.

What a museum website costs and how long it takes

Museum projects vary too widely for a single price, but the cost drivers are predictable: the number of content types, the size and quality of the collection data, the integrations with ticketing and membership systems, the number of languages and how much custom design the brand needs. Our web design cost breakdown shows where the money goes on a typical build, and the website redesign cost guide covers rebuilds of an existing site. For timing, our data from 29 real Drupal migrations found a median of seven and a half months from start to launch for organisation websites. Plan for at least that if your museum has a large archive to move.

Methodology and data

Sample. Every museum on Wikipedia’s lists of the most-visited museums in the world and in the United States, as of 24 October 2026 (98 entries, 95 distinct museums with an official website). Attendance figures on those lists come mostly from The Art Newspaper’s annual survey, the TEA Global Experience Index and the institutions themselves. Official websites came from Wikidata. We corrected two: Cleveland’s current site is clevelandart.org, and Fernbank’s is fernbankmuseum.org. For the Palacio de Cristal we used the website of the Museo Reina Sofía, which runs it.

Platform. Identified from the homepage code and HTTP headers, for example Drupal’s drupal-settings-json script, generator tags and X-Drupal-Cache headers, WordPress’s wp-content paths and the asset hosts of Sanity, Contentful, DatoCMS and Contentstack. Where a site matched no known fingerprint, we recorded it as custom or not identifiable. Sixteen sites returned a bot challenge, an error or nothing at all, and are excluded from the shares. We did not try to get past those checks.

Homepage elements. Measured on 72 homepages, from the HTML as served or, for a few sites that block scripted requests, as rendered in a browser. A ticket link means a link or button in the header or navigation whose text or address mentions tickets, booking or reservations, in about ten languages. Hours means an opening-hours pattern in the visible text. Accessibility means a link to an accessibility page or statement. Images “with no alt attribute” have no alt at all; images marked decorative with an empty alt are counted as fine. A homepage is a single page, so these figures describe first impressions, not whole sites.

Data. Download the dataset (one row per museum, including the evidence for each platform) as a CSV file. It is free to reuse with attribution to Gspikes.

Planning a new museum website or a move off an old platform? Our Drupal development team builds and maintains sites for cultural institutions, and our website design service covers the brief, the design system and the templates. If you want a second opinion on your current site, ask us for a review.