CMS for Publishers: What the 50 Biggest US News Sites Run, and Where Drupal Fits

There is no single best CMS for publishers, and the biggest newsrooms prove it. We checked what the 50 most-visited news websites in the United States run on, and most of them don’t use an off-the-shelf CMS at all. They build their own. Of those that buy rather than build, WordPress is the most common choice, followed by two licensed newsroom suites, Brightspot and Arc XP.

Drupal, which this blog writes about a lot, did not show up once in that list. It shows up somewhere else: in European newsrooms, trade publishers, book houses and broadcasters, the publishers whose content is more than a stream of articles. Below is what we found, what it tells you about choosing a CMS for your own publication, and where each kind of platform earns its place.

How we checked the 50 biggest news sites

We started from Press Gazette’s monthly ranking of the top 50 news websites in the US, which uses Similarweb traffic estimates. We used the September 2026 list, published on 8 October. Seven entries are aggregators or platforms rather than publishers: MSN, Google News, Yahoo News, Yahoo Finance, Substack, NewsBreak and the Drudge Report. We set them aside, which left 43 publishers.

On 27 October 2026 we loaded each homepage and identified the platform from fingerprints in the page code and the server’s response: WordPress VIP’s x-powered-by header, Brightspot’s content-ID tag, the /pf/resources/ paths that Arc XP’s page builder uses, Drupal’s settings script, and so on. Where a plain request was refused, we opened the page in a normal browser. Five sites still refused (the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, Men’s Journal and SFGate), and we did not try to get past those checks. That leaves 38 publishers with a result.

What the 50 biggest US news websites run on

Most big newsrooms build their own. Twenty-three of the 38 run software that does not match any commercial or open-source CMS we know: Fox News, CNN, the BBC, NBC News, CBS News, ABC News, NPR, Forbes, Bloomberg, Axios and the Guardian among them. Some of these are fully in-house platforms. Others may run a known CMS behind a custom front end that hides it, so treat 23 as a ceiling for “built in-house”, not an exact count. Either way, these organisations treat publishing software as part of the product and employ the engineers to match.

WordPress is the most common thing they buy. Seven of the 38 run on WordPress. Four of them, the New York Post, The Hill, Variety and The US Sun, announce WordPress VIP in their response headers. Newsweek and Al Jazeera use WordPress headless: their images come from WordPress upload folders, but the pages are rendered by a separate JavaScript front end. The Gateway Pundit runs a conventional WordPress site.

Licensed newsroom suites take the next slot. Brightspot runs AP News, Politico, the Los Angeles Times and US News & World Report. Arc XP, the publishing platform built and sold by The Washington Post, runs Reuters and AL.com. Two more sites run on their parent company’s shared platform: People on Dotdash Meredith’s and USA Today on Gannett’s.

Front ends are moving to JavaScript. Ten of the 38 render through a JavaScript framework, eight of them on Next.js: the BBC, NBC News, Newsweek, BuzzFeed, Patch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg and Axios. That matches what we saw among the world’s biggest museums in our museum website study, where one site in four had a decoupled front end.

Where Drupal fits for publishers

None of the 38 big US news sites we checked runs Drupal. That isn’t the same as Drupal being absent from publishing. To see where it is used, we went through every case study on drupal.org tagged Media or Publishing from December 2024 to October 2026. After removing vendor tools, libraries and organisations that don’t publish, 27 publisher projects remained.

The mix is broad. Nine are newsrooms and broadcasters, such as Stuff in New Zealand, Belgium’s public broadcaster VRT, the Austrian news magazine profil and the Greek business daily Imerisia. Nine are trade and B2B publishers, including Aviation Week and TTG Media. Five are book and education publishers: Gallimard, Hachette Livre, Oetinger, La Scuola and Éditions Théâtrales. Twenty of the 27 are in Europe, the UK or Ireland. Only four are in the US.

What they asked Drupal to do is more telling than who they are. Speed and scale came up in 78% of the projects, editorial workflow in 70% and migration from an older platform in 63%. Fifty-nine percent describe structured content, such as content types, taxonomies or shared content pools. One in three runs several brands or sites from one platform. Hachette Livre replaced more than 100 sites on obsolete technology with a headless Drupal site factory and reports hosting costs down by two-thirds. A large privately owned business media group moved more than 20 brands, each on its own platform, onto one Drupal multisite. Stuff describes an API-first, multi-tenant Drupal setup built for up to 200 million requests a day, with a 30% cut in cloud and operating costs.

Commerce is the other strand. Seven of the 27 mention subscriptions, a paywall or membership, and six mention e-commerce. The Irish Times Group is a good example of how publishers mix platforms. Its news site runs on Arc XP: we saw Arc’s headers on irishtimes.com. But its subscription websites were consolidated onto Drupal Commerce, one platform serving all three of its domains.

The most honest case study in the set comes from the French monthly Alternatives Économiques. The agency that ran its CMS comparison recommended WordPress, which scored slightly better for editorial content and ease of use. The publisher chose Drupal anyway, expecting that long-term customisation would cost less, even though the first build would cost more. That is the trade-off in one sentence.

What a CMS for publishers has to do

Whatever you choose, test it against the work your newsroom actually does every day. This is the checklist we use when a publisher asks us to review a platform:

1. Editorial workflow. Drafts, review and approval, scheduled publishing and unpublishing, and revisions you can compare and roll back. Several people editing at once without overwriting each other.
2. Structured content. Authors, topics, series, events, products and places as real records, not text in the body. That structure is what feeds topic pages, newsletters, apps and syndication.
3. Speed under a traffic spike. Breaking news doubles traffic in minutes. Pages need to be cached at a CDN and refreshed the moment a story changes, not when a cache happens to expire.
4. Revenue plumbing. Ad slots that don’t push the layout around, a subscription or paywall service that knows who is logged in, and newsletter sign-ups in the right places. Twenty-four of the 27 big US news homepages we could read in full promote a newsletter, and 20 load Google Ad Manager.
5. News SEO. Article and news schema markup, clean author pages, fast article templates and, for Google News, a news sitemap. Google’s news sitemap guidelines ask for articles from the last two days only, up to 1,000 per sitemap.
6. Several brands, one platform. If you publish more than one title, check how the CMS shares content, users and code between them before you check anything else.
7. A migration path for the archive. Decades of articles, URLs and images have to move without breaking links or search rankings.

The Drupal toolkit for publishers

If Drupal fits your shape of publication, most of the checklist is covered by core or by well-maintained contributed modules. Every module below has a release that supports Drupal 11, checked on drupal.org on 27 October 2026.

• Content Moderation and Workflows (core) for drafts, review states and approvals, with Scheduler for timed publishing and unpublishing.
• Paragraphs or core Layout Builder for flexible article bodies and landing pages.
• Search API Solr for archive search with facets.
• Metatag and Schema.org Metatag for article and news markup, and Simple XML Sitemap for sitemaps.
• Purge, with a purger for Varnish or the Fastly module, so the CDN clears a story’s cached pages the moment an editor saves it.
• Drupal Commerce for subscriptions and paid products, as the Irish Times Group and Aviation Week use it.
• Thunder, a Drupal distribution for professional publishing whose maintainers include developers at Hubert Burda Media, bundles much of this. Its current release requires Drupal 11.4.

Drupal also handles content in several languages in core, which matters for the European publishers in our set. Our guide to Drupal multilingual sites covers how that works, and the Drupal SEO guide covers the search side.

Choosing a CMS for your publication

The survey suggests four questions, asked in order.

First, do you have a product and engineering team of your own? If you employ dozens of developers and treat the platform as part of the product, building or extending your own is what most of the top 50 do. Below that scale, it’s rarely worth it.

Second, is it one brand of mostly articles? Then WordPress is hard to beat. Editors know it, the editing screen is simple, and WordPress VIP and other managed hosts take care of scale. We say the same to non-publishers: our piece on moving from Drupal to WordPress explains when the simpler platform is the right call.

Third, would you rather license the whole newsroom stack? Brightspot and Arc XP sell a CMS, hosting and newsroom tools as a service. You trade control of the code for a vendor that runs everything, under a licence negotiated with the vendor.

Fourth, is your content more than articles? Several brands on one platform, structured data such as events, products, courses or books, subscriptions and commerce on the same site, or several languages. That is where Drupal earns its place, and it is exactly what the 27 publishers in our case-study set were building. If you are a newsletter-first publication with a team of one or two, a hosted newsletter platform such as Ghost or Substack is usually enough to start.

News website design: what the big homepages share

We also looked at the 27 big US news homepages we could read in full, as served, without a browser. They follow a pattern. Twenty-four promote a newsletter. Seventeen show a subscribe or subscription link on the homepage itself. Twenty load Google Ad Manager and 15 also load Prebid for header bidding. Sixteen advertise an RSS feed, and 15 carry news-specific schema markup on the homepage. The design lesson is that a news homepage is a revenue page as much as a front page: every big site we could read asks for an email address, a subscription or both, and the layout has to leave room for ads without shifting while the page loads.

Cost and timeline

Publishing platforms are priced in very different ways: a licence for Brightspot or Arc XP, a hosting and support contract for WordPress VIP, and build plus hosting plus support for Drupal. The build is usually the larger number, and the migration is where projects run over. Our breakdown of Drupal migration cost covers the line items, and our study of 29 real Drupal migrations found a median of seven and a half months from start to launch for organisation websites. A publisher with a deep archive should plan for at least that.

Methodology and data

News site sample. The 50 sites in Press Gazette’s ranking of the most-visited news websites in the US for September 2026, based on Similarweb data. Seven aggregators and platforms were excluded, leaving 43 publishers. Five refused both a plain request and a browser visit, and are reported as not checked.

Platform detection. From homepage code and HTTP headers on 27 October 2026: WordPress paths, generator tags and the WordPress VIP header; Brightspot’s content-ID meta tag; Arc XP’s page-builder paths and headers; Drupal’s settings script and headers; and the asset paths of the main headless CMS services. We checked every match by hand. On Google News, for example, a wp-content path came from another publisher’s image and was discarded. “In-house or not identifiable” means no known fingerprint, not proof of an in-house build. Homepage features were measured on the 27 homepages we could read as served, from visible text and page code.

Drupal case studies. All case studies on drupal.org in the Media or Publishing sectors, published between December 2024 and October 2026, collected on 14 October 2026. We removed vendor products, developer tools and organisations that do not publish, leaving 27. Each was coded by hand for the publisher type, region and the topics it describes. Case studies describe a project at the time it was written. They don’t prove what a site runs today.

Data. Download the news CMS survey (one row per site, with the evidence for each platform) as a CSV file, and the coded case studies as a second CSV. Both are free to reuse with attribution to Gspikes.

Planning a new publishing platform, or moving several titles onto one? Our Drupal development team builds multi-brand and subscription sites, and our Drupal migration service moves archives without losing their search traffic. If you’d like a second opinion on your current setup, ask us for a review.