WordPress Still Runs the Middle East’s Web, but Salla, Shopify and AI Builders Are Closing In

WordPress runs about 85 in every 100 websites in the UAE and Saudi Arabia. That is more than double its share of the global web, where it powers about 40 in every 100 sites.

The numbers come from two different lenses. W3Techs surveys the global web, while Aguko tracks the technologies running on .ae and .sa domains, and together they show a region that builds very differently from the rest of the world.

This article brings those numbers together. It covers the global ranking, the UAE and Saudi Arabia in detail, the local platforms growing in each market, and the AI and no-code tools that are changing how the region’s websites get built.

The global picture, in one chart

WordPress is still the largest CMS on the web by a distance. The chart below shows the share of all websites each platform runs, using the latest W3Techs survey.

Share of all websites, W3Techs, 5 November 2026. Bars scaled to the leader.

The gap at the top is the story. WordPress holds about 58% of the market among sites with a known CMS, more than seven times Shopify, the nearest rival.

WordPress is also the only platform in the top ten that is losing share. It peaked at 43.6% of all websites in January 2025, started 2026 at 43.0%, and stood at 39.5% on 5 November 2026.

The decline does not mean businesses are abandoning WordPress in large numbers. The share of sites running no detectable CMS rose from 28.6% in October 2025 to 32.1% in October 2026, which means a growing share of new sites are not using a CMS at all.

W3Techs now lists AI builders in its own rankings. Lovable sits at 0.3% of all websites, Framer and Astro at 0.2% each, and v0 at 0.1%.

Share of all websites, W3Techs. 2015 figures from the W3Techs yearly series, 2026 figures from the 5 November 2026 survey.

The decade tells a clear story. More of the web runs on a CMS than ever before, WordPress grew from 23.3% to 39.5% of all sites, and the old open-source rivals Joomla and Drupal lost two thirds of their share while hosted builders grew from almost nothing.

The UAE builds on WordPress more than almost anywhere

WordPress runs 86.38% of .ae domains where a CMS can be detected. That is more than double its global share and one of the highest concentrations of any major market.

Share of .ae domains with a detected CMS, Aguko, November 2026. Bars scaled to the leader.

Wix is a clear second at 7.28%, which makes the UAE a two-platform market in practice. Everything else combined is barely 6%.

The pattern is even stronger in online stores. WooCommerce powers 74.69% of .ae e-commerce sites, with Shopify second at 16.08% and Squarespace Commerce third at 2.94%.

The reason is practical rather than ideological. WordPress is cheap to host, easy to staff for, and every agency in Dubai and Abu Dhabi already builds on it, so a business that chooses it can switch suppliers without rebuilding its site.

Saudi Arabia is WordPress country, with a local twist

Saudi Arabia looks much like the UAE at the top. WordPress runs 85.07% of .sa domains with a detected CMS, and Wix is second at 6.04%.

Share of .sa domains with a detected CMS, Aguko, November 2026. Bars scaled to the leader.

The difference is what sits underneath WordPress. Divi is the theme on 55.21% of Saudi WordPress sites, and Elementor powers 71.38% of landing pages built in the Kingdom, which makes the Saudi web a WordPress plus page builder market rather than a pure WordPress one.

Saudi hosting tells the same story. Hostinger leads with 39.17% of .sa domains, ahead of Bluehost at 28.52% and SiteGround at 23.50%, which fits a market of small businesses and first-time store owners rather than enterprises.

E-commerce is where Saudi Arabia breaks from the global pattern. WooCommerce leads with 61.13%, but Zid is second at 10.51%, ahead of Shopify at 5.33% and Salla at 5.22%.

Share of .sa domains with a detected e-commerce platform, Aguko, November 2026. Bars scaled to the leader.

No other large market puts a homegrown platform second. That single number is the clearest sign that Saudi commerce is building its own stack.

Salla and Zid are the Gulf’s own answer

Salla was founded in Makkah in 2016 by Nawaf Hariri and Salman Butt. It raised a $130 million pre-IPO round in March 2024, led by Investcorp with Sanabil Investments and STV, and its general manager confirmed in February 2026 that the company is preparing for an IPO.

The company says it serves more than 68,000 active sellers and has processed more than SAR 50 billion in gross merchandise value. It bought payments fintech Paylink in September 2026, pulling checkout into its own stack.

Zid was founded in Riyadh in 2017 by Sultan Al-Asimi, Mazen Al-Darrab and Mohammed Al-Dosari. It has raised $59 million in total, including a $50 million Series B in October 2022 led by Impact46, with Wa’ed Ventures, Elm and the Public Investment Fund taking part.

Zid serves more than 10,000 merchants across the Middle East and Africa. It signed a partnership with Trendyol in May 2025 that gives its sellers access to more than three million users, and it signed an agreement with Barq at Money20/20 to build financial tools for Saudi businesses.

Company figures and public funding announcements. Merchant counts are company stated.

The two platforms compete on the same ground but sell different strengths. Salla wins on scale and brand recognition, while Zid wins on inventory, multi-channel retail and merchant financing.

Both are expanding beyond Saudi Arabia. Salla is moving into the UAE and Egypt, and Zid already operates across the Gulf, which puts the two Saudi platforms in direct competition with Shopify for the region’s merchants.

The market they are fighting over is large and still growing. Saudi e-commerce was worth about $15 billion in 2024 and is forecast to reach $29 billion by 2030, while the wider MENA market is projected to reach $57 billion in 2026, according to the EZDubai and Euromonitor report.

Egypt is the exception that proves the rule

Egypt is the one large market in the region where a global platform leads. Shopify powers about 13,000 live stores in Egypt as of the second quarter of 2026, up 85% on the same period a year earlier, according to Store Leads data reported by EnterpriseAM.

The local challenger is Wuilt, a Cairo builder founded in 2019 by Ahmed Rostom and Mahmoud Metwaly. It dropped all subscription fees in Egypt in April 2025 and raised $2 million in August 2025, in a round led by Flat6Labs and MTF VC, according to Wamda.

Wuilt says more than 20,000 merchants joined after the pivot to free. Independent tracking counted only 328 active stores on the platform at the end of the first quarter of 2026, which shows how far the local challengers still have to go to convert signups into trading stores.

ExpandCart, the earlier Egyptian challenger founded in 2013, has faded. Its site now sits largely dormant, which is a warning for any platform that stops shipping while its rivals keep building.

AI is changing how websites get built

The AI website builder market was worth $3.41 billion in 2026 and is forecast to reach $14.78 billion by 2035, growing at 17.7% a year, according to Custom Market Insights.

Wix, the largest builder, has more than 250 million registered users. Its AI-built sites drove 40% more user engagement in their first year than sites built by hand on the same platform, and it launched Harmony in January 2026 to pair prompt-based creation with visual editing.

Framer, the design-led builder, reached a $2 billion valuation in its August 2025 Series D round. Webflow, the agency favourite, added AI layout, content and SEO tools to a platform that already runs 0.8% of all websites.

WordPress is answering with AI layers rather than a rebuild. Elementor AI and Divi AI generate text, images and layouts inside the builders Saudi and Emirati sites already use, and 10Web turns a prompt into a full WordPress site.

Researchers at Stanford and Imperial College London found that roughly 35% of new websites are now AI-generated or AI-assisted. The figure is a sign of how fast the default is shifting from choosing a CMS to describing a site in plain language.

The shift is also visible in the rankings. W3Techs now tracks Lovable, Framer, Astro and v0 as website platforms in their own right, which would have been unthinkable two years ago.

No-code tools and design are moving with it

No-code building is now the normal way a small business gets online in the Gulf. The website builder market was worth $8.41 billion in 2026 and is forecast to reach $15.97 billion by 2035, with agencies and web professionals the fastest growing customer group.

Design in the region has its own rules. Sites must work in Arabic and English, read right to left as well as left to right, and load fast on mobile, where well over 70% of online purchases in the region now happen.

That is why the page builder matters as much as the CMS. Divi and Elementor decide what most Saudi and Emirati business sites actually look like, and a designer’s choice of builder is now a business decision, not a technical one.

The premium end is moving the other way. Agencies in Dubai are pitching Webflow and Framer for brand sites, where animation, typography and speed matter more than a plugin library, and Framer’s $2 billion valuation shows investors agree.

The middle is where the fight is. A business that wants a store picks between WooCommerce, Shopify, Salla and Zid, while a business that wants a brand site picks between WordPress with a page builder, Webflow and Framer, and the price gap between those choices has never been smaller.

What the data says about where the Gulf builds next

WordPress is not being replaced, it is being layered over. Its share is falling globally, but in the Gulf it still runs more than four in five sites, and the challengers are winning the new work around it rather than the sites it already runs.

Commerce is the beachhead for local platforms. Salla and Zid did not win by building a better CMS, they won by solving Saudi payments, shipping and regulation, and that is a playbook Shopify cannot copy from outside.

The credibility gap is the real barrier for local builders. Wuilt’s 20,000 signups against 328 active stores shows that a free platform can win registrations and still lose the market, because merchants stay where their store actually trades.

AI will compress the market before it replaces it. A prompt now produces in a minute what took an agency a week, which means the next five years will reward platforms that own the merchant relationship, not the ones that own the editor.

How we measured this

Global figures come from W3Techs, which surveys more than 20 million sites and updates its reports daily. Regional figures come from Aguko, which tracks the technologies running on .ae and .sa domains, and cover sites where a CMS or e-commerce platform could be detected.

Merchant counts for Salla, Zid and Wuilt are company figures unless stated otherwise. Market size forecasts come from the firms named in the text, and different firms measure the market differently, so treat the forecasts as ranges rather than exact totals.

All figures were checked on 9 November 2026. W3Techs updates daily, so the global shares will have moved slightly by the time you read this.