Why TYPO3 is still everywhere in Germany and Austria, and what it means for an Irish business

The point: TYPO3 is a German speaking habit with real reasons behind it

Sell into Germany or Austria, or buy a company there, and sooner or later someone will tell you the website runs on TYPO3. In Ireland, the content management system (CMS) conversation is mostly WordPress, Shopify and Wix, so a good few Irish readers have never heard of it.

In the German speaking world it is a normal, respectable choice: the second most common CMS on .de websites after WordPress,¹ and the system behind many universities, counties and federal states.²

So I explain what TYPO3 is and how common it really is, why German and Austrian organisations choose it, what it costs to own, and how an invented Irish business decides whether to keep, migrate or rebuild a German TYPO3 site.

The worked examples are invented so every step can be shown. The market figures are sourced, each fetched on 8 November 2026.

What TYPO3 actually is

TYPO3 is an open source CMS written in PHP. The Danish developer Kasper Skårhøj created it in 1997 and showed it publicly in 1998.³ In 2004 he stepped back, and the community founded the TYPO3 Association to lead the project. The Association is a not for profit membership organisation based in Baar, Switzerland.³ It is funded by membership fees, donations and events, and puts that money back into core development and community projects.³

In 2016 the Association founded TYPO3 GmbH, a wholly owned company that sells support and services. It does not build websites for clients.³ Those are built by independent agencies, many of them TYPO3 partners.

So the software is free, the Swiss association owns the project, the company sells paid extras such as extended support, and your website itself is usually built and looked after by an agency that is none of the three.

Two TYPO3 words come up in every conversation. Fluid is its template language, the code that turns content into HTML pages. TypoScript is its configuration language, a reference of object types and properties that set how the frontend and the backend behave (the backend form is also called TSconfig).⁴ A TYPO3 site is therefore a mix of PHP, Fluid templates, TypoScript and configuration files. That is specialist knowledge, and it matters later when we talk about who can maintain the site.

Worked example: reading what you have inherited

An example: Lee Quay Instruments is an invented maker of laboratory scales in Cork. In 2026 it buys a small German distributor. The distributor's website runs on TYPO3, built by a German agency eight years ago. The managing director, Siobhán, asks three questions before anything else.

First, which version is it? The agency says 11.5. Second, who holds the code and the hosting accounts? The agency does, on its own servers. Third, which parts are standard TYPO3 and which were written for this site? The agency lists 14 extensions, of which four are its own.

The version decides the support deadline. The hosting and the code decide how free she is to choose. And the four custom extensions are code nobody else maintains, so any upgrade has to carry them along.

How common TYPO3 really is

The best public numbers come from W3Techs, which surveys the technology websites use. It looks at a sample of more than 20 million sites it considers relevant, leaves out duplicates and redirected domains, and does not count subdomains as separate websites.⁵ Its CMS shares are mostly stated as a share of websites whose CMS it can identify, not as a share of all websites. A site built without a recognisable CMS is outside that base.

With that in mind, here are the figures as of 8 November 2026:

• Worldwide, TYPO3 runs on 0.5% of websites whose CMS W3Techs knows, and 0.3% of all websites.⁶ WordPress runs on 58.1% of websites with a known CMS and 39.4% of all websites.⁷
• On the .de domain, WordPress has 54.0% and TYPO3 6.7% of websites with a known CMS, which puts TYPO3 second, ahead of Shopify at 4.9%.¹
• On the .at domain, WordPress has 54.8% and TYPO3 6.4%, just ahead of Wix at 6.2%.⁸
• On the .ie domain, the top three are WordPress at 63.4%, Shopify at 8.4% and Wix at 7.6%. TYPO3 is not among them.⁹
• On the .ch domain, the top three are WordPress at 50.8%, Wix at 9.1% and Shopify at 4.1%. TYPO3 is not among them either.¹⁰

The horizontal axis shows the top level domain, the ending of the web address. The vertical axis shows the share of websites with an identified CMS that run TYPO3. The takeaway is the gap: on German and Austrian addresses TYPO3 is roughly 13 times as common as it is across the web as a whole. It is a regional system, and a strong one in its region.

Two cautions. A top level domain is not a country: a German company may use .com, and an Irish shop may own a .de address. And WordPress is still about eight times as common on .de. TYPO3 is a strong second, not the leader. The old version of this article said it "dominates", which these numbers do not support, so I have corrected it.

Worked example: what 6.7% means for a supplier list

An example: Siobhán's sales team draws up a list of 40 German distributors with .de websites whose CMS can be identified. How many should she expect to be running TYPO3?

$$E[K] = n \times p$$

Here $E[K]$ is the expected number of TYPO3 sites on the list, $n$ is the number of sites on the list and $p$ is the share of .de sites with a known CMS that run TYPO3. Foundations: expected value

With $n = 40$ and $p = 0.067$, the expected count is $40 \times 0.067 = 2.68$, so about three. With the WordPress share of $0.540$ the same sum gives $21.6$, so about 22. For any integration with these partners, WordPress comes first, but TYPO3 is too common to ignore. Forty sites from one trade will not match the national average exactly, so the sum tells her what to expect, not what she will find.

Where TYPO3 concentrates: universities and the public sector

The national share hides where TYPO3 is really strong. CMS Census, a research project that checks the main website of German organisations by category, gives the clearest picture I could find.

Of 415 German universities on its list, 201 run TYPO3 on their main website, 48.43%. WordPress follows with 49, 11.81%, and Drupal with 24, 5.78%.² Of 294 German Landkreise (counties), 65 run TYPO3, 22.11%, while for 129, 43.88%, no CMS could be detected.¹¹ Of the 16 federal states, three run TYPO3 on their main site, more than any other detected system, and for eight no CMS was detected.¹²

The Technical University of Munich, for example, relaunched its website on TYPO3 from 2021, with an upgrade to version 11, an automated content migration and accessibility work aimed at BITV, the German public sector standard, across what it describes as 200 subdomains.¹³

If you sell to German higher education or local government, TYPO3 is the system on the other side of the integration.

Worked example: two numbers for the same thing

An example: an invented Galway software firm sells timetabling software to universities. Its German partner says "54% of German universities run TYPO3". The firm's analyst finds the CMS Census page, which says 48.43%. Who is right?

Both, for different dates. An agency article quoting CMS Census gave 54.22% of 422 universities as of June 2024.¹⁴ The page today shows 201 of 415, and states no date.² The base changed (422 universities then, 415 now) and the count changed.

The analyst works it through. $0.5422 \times 422 = 228.8$, so about 229 universities in 2024. Today 201. The drop is about 28 universities, and the share fell by $54.22 - 48.43 = 5.79$ percentage points. Foundations: percentages

Two snapshots are too thin to call a trend. The lesson is to quote a figure with its date and its base, and to plan for TYPO3 at roughly half of German universities either way.

Why German and Austrian organisations choose it

The documented reasons first. TYPO3 has a long, predictable support policy. A new long term support (LTS) version gets free support from the Core and Security Teams for three years.¹⁵ After that, paid Extended Long Term Support (ELTS) can extend security fixes, sold in one year periods for up to three years.¹⁵ TYPO3 v14.3 LTS was released on 21 April 2026, with free updates for more than three years and up to seven years of maintenance through ELTS.¹⁶

WordPress, by contrast, officially supports only its latest version, and its security team backports fixes to older versions as a courtesy.¹⁷ Ruby on Rails gives each release series bug fixes for one year and security fixes for two years after its first release.¹⁸ For an organisation that budgets in multi year cycles and wants the same version for years, the TYPO3 promise is easy to plan around.

TYPO3 also has multiple languages and staged publishing in the core, which we look at below. And the governance suits public bodies: the project is owned by a not for profit association in Switzerland, not by a single company.³

Now my view, carried over from the old version of this article. Public institutions and traditional firms in Germany and Austria often prefer open source software that does not depend on an American vendor, and TYPO3 is European. Procurement is slow and contracts run for years, so once TYPO3 is in, it tends to stay. And a large network of TYPO3 agencies recommends it, which is natural, because it is what they know and sell. Many of their clients are not technical, so the agency's recommendation often becomes the decision.

Worked example: planning around the support calendar

An example: Siobhán's German site is on 11.5. On the official TYPO3 release page, free support for 11 ended on 31 October 2024, and ELTS runs until 31 October 2028.¹⁹ For 12, free support ended on 30 April 2026 and ELTS runs until 30 April 2030. For 13 LTS, free support runs until 31 December 2027. For 14 LTS, the page says free maintenance bug fixes until December 2027 and security updates until June 2029, with ELTS until 30 June 2032.¹⁹

Today is November 2026. Unless someone bought ELTS, Siobhán's site has had no security fixes for two years. That is the first thing to check, before any strategy. If she upgrades to 14 LTS now, she has free security updates until June 2029, roughly two years and seven months from today. ELTS for 11 instead covers her until October 2028, and then she still has to upgrade.

Multiple languages, built into the core

This is TYPO3's strongest technical argument for a business in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, where one website often serves German, English, French or Italian.

Languages are set in the site configuration. Editors can translate content in two ways. In connected mode, the translation is linked to the original. In free mode, content is copied into another language and then lives on its own.²⁰ The site configuration then decides what happens when a translation is missing, through a setting called fallbackType:²⁰

• strict: records come from the default language and are overlaid with the translation. If a record is not translated, it is not shown at all.
• fallback: like strict, but a missing translation is looked up in a chain of other languages, for example German, then English.
• free: TYPO3 fetches the translated records directly and ignores the default language.

WordPress, by contrast, says it does not support a multilingual site out of the box. You use a community plugin, or a separate site per language with WordPress Multisite.²¹ That works, but it is one more component to maintain, with its own upgrade cycle.

Worked example: the missing translations

An example: an invented Limerick maker of garden furniture runs a TYPO3 site with English as the default and German as the second language. It has 120 product pages, and 30 have not been translated into German yet.

With fallbackType strict, the German site shows 90 products, and the other 30 do not exist for a German visitor: $30 \div 120 = 25\%$ of the range. With fallback set to the chain German, then English, the German site shows all 120, of which 30 appear in English. With free mode, the German site shows only what editors created in German, whatever the English site holds.

None of these is wrong. It is a business decision hidden in one configuration line, so ask which mode your site uses before you count products or traffic on the German site.

Accessibility: the CMS helps, the templates decide

Accessibility is a legal requirement in Germany and Austria for the public sector, and since 28 June 2025 for many online shops and services too.²² The same European Accessibility Act applies in Ireland, so an Irish seller is bound by it at home as well as in Germany. I cover the law in the article on accessibility requirements in the EU, so here I stay on what TYPO3 does and does not do.

The honest summary from TYPO3's own news site, in an article by an accessibility consultant, is that TYPO3 did not, at the time of writing in 2022, ship a complete default frontend template, so the accessibility of the public website depends largely on the templates the agency builds.²³ The same article reports tests of the editing backend by two blind users with screen readers on version 11.5: trained editors could use it, with problems such as unlabelled fields and unannounced error messages, which were filed as tickets.²³ Version 14 now includes a default theme out of the box.¹⁶

So TYPO3 can produce an accessible site, as the Munich relaunch shows, and it can produce an inaccessible one. The CMS is not the guarantee. The templates and the content are.

Worked example: where the accessibility work sits

An example: an invented Waterford company's German TYPO3 site has 11 content element templates, things like a text block, an image gallery, a product table and a contact form. An accessibility audit against the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) finds problems in four of them: the gallery has no alt text field, the product table has no header cells, the form fields have no labels, and the accordion cannot be opened with the keyboard.

Each fix is a change to one Fluid template, plus a new alt text field the editors then fill in for existing images. The CMS needs no change at all. So "is TYPO3 accessible" is the wrong question. The right one is "are our templates accessible, and who checks them".

What it really costs to own

The first is skills. A TYPO3 site needs people who know PHP, Fluid and TypoScript, so an Irish owner usually stays with a German agency or finds a German speaking developer. That is a dependency, not a disaster, but price it in.

The second is change. I have worked on projects where TYPO3 was the default, and I saw what it cost. Teams spent weeks building things that would take hours elsewhere. Tracking scripts broke every other month. Nobody was quite sure how the permissions worked. And marketers were locked out of meaningful changes because "the agency needs to do that". That is my experience, not a law of nature, and a well run TYPO3 site can avoid all of it.

The third is the custom code. Here the old version of this article overstated the case. It claimed TYPO3 projects are not deployed with Git and continuous integration, and that the ecosystem never embraced automated testing. The official getting started guide installs TYPO3 with Composer, the standard PHP package manager, which is what makes a Git based deployment straightforward.²⁴ And the core team writes that the TYPO3 core has a long history of automated testing, with its own testing framework that extension developers and whole projects can use.²⁵ So the tools exist. Whether the agency that built your site used them for your four custom extensions is a separate question, and that is the code you inherit. Ask to see the tests.

On the plus side, TYPO3's own Workspaces extension adds workflows with custom stages and versioning, for a more granular editing and publishing process.²⁶ For an organisation where a page must be approved before it goes live, that is real value that would otherwise be built or bought.

Worked example: the price of small changes

An example: an invented Kilkenny parts supplier with a German TYPO3 site asks its agency for small changes, a new form field, a banner, a tracking event, about 12 times a year. The agency charges a minimum of half a day per ticket, which in this example is €450.

Twelve tickets at €450 is $12 \times 450 = €5,400$ a year. Over five years that is €27,000, before any larger project. That yearly cost of small changes is the figure to carry into the next section.

Keep, migrate or rebuild: the decision with every euro shown

An Irish owner of a German TYPO3 site has four honest options:

1. Stay on the current version and buy ELTS, then upgrade when ELTS ends.
2. Upgrade now to the current LTS and stay with TYPO3.
3. Migrate to WordPress with a multilingual plugin.
4. Rebuild on Ruby on Rails, which is how I build.

I compare them on total cost over a fixed horizon, with the risks priced in as expected values.

$$TC = C_0 + 12\,T\,m + U + \sum_i p_i\,x_i$$

Here $TC$ is the total cost over the horizon, $C_0$ is the one off cost of the build, upgrade or migration today, $T$ is the horizon in years, $m$ is the monthly cost of hosting and care, $U$ is any later upgrade or licence cost inside the horizon, and $\sum_i p_i\,x_i$ is the expected cost of the risks, each risk's probability $p_i$ times its cost $x_i$. Foundations: expected value

Worked example: the Cork decision

Back to Siobhán in Cork. Her German site has three languages, about 200 pages, a product catalogue and an enquiry form. It sells nothing directly. The horizon is $T = 5$ years. Every figure below is an assumption of this example, not a quote. ELTS prices are not published, which is why I assume one.¹⁵

Option 1, stay on 11.5 with ELTS, then upgrade in late 2028. No cost today, so $C_0 = 0$. Care with the German agency at $m = €900$ a month gives $12 \times 5 \times 900 = €54,000$. ELTS at an assumed €5,000 a year for two years, plus the upgrade in 2028 at €20,000, gives $U = €30,000$. One risk: a 25% chance the four custom extensions need a rewrite costing €12,000, so $0.25 \times 12,000 = €3,000$. Total: $0 + 54,000 + 30,000 + 3,000 = €87,000$.

Option 2, upgrade to 14 LTS now. The upgrade costs $C_0 = €20,000$. Care stays at €900 a month, €54,000. Free security support ends in June 2029, so a smaller step to the next LTS inside the horizon is assumed at $U = €8,000$. The same extension risk adds €3,000. Total: $20,000 + 54,000 + 8,000 + 3,000 = €85,000$.

Option 3, migrate to WordPress. The migration costs $C_0 = €28,000$. Care at €700 a month gives €42,000. A multilingual plugin licence at an assumed €300 a year gives $U = €1,500$. The main risk is search traffic: a 40% chance of a €10,000 clean up after redirects or translations go wrong, so €4,000. Total: $28,000 + 42,000 + 1,500 + 4,000 = €75,500$.

Option 4, rebuild on Rails. The build costs $C_0 = €45,000$. Care at €800 a month, with framework upgrades included, gives €48,000. No licence, so $U = 0$. The migration risk is a 30% chance of a €10,000 clean up, so €3,000. Total: $45,000 + 48,000 + 0 + 3,000 = €96,000$.

The horizontal axis shows the four options, the vertical axis the expected five year total cost in euro, risks included. Read naively, WordPress wins and Rails loses. Two things matter more than the ranking.

First, ELTS is not a saving. Option 1 costs €2,000 more than option 2 and ends in the same upgrade, two years later, on an older base. ELTS buys time. It is worth buying when you need time, for example while you decide, and not otherwise.

Second, the sum counts cost only, not what the site has to do. For a brochure that must stay correct in three languages, keeping TYPO3 and upgrading is the calm choice, and WordPress costs less on paper but carries more migration risk.

Worked example: when the rebuild pays for itself

Now add the cost of change from the Kilkenny example. Suppose Siobhán plans to use the site actively: new landing pages for campaigns, a trade enquiry flow tied to the Cork sales system, regular tracking changes. Suppose her team expects 12 small changes a year. In this example each costs €450 through the TYPO3 agency and €150 on the rebuild, because the rebuild is designed for her team to make the common changes themselves.

The rebuild costs $96,000 - 85,000 = €11,000$ more than the upgrade over five years. The yearly saving is $12 \times (450 - 150) = €3,600$, so $5 \times 3,600 = €18,000$ over five years. The rebuild comes out €7,000 ahead.

At three changes a year, the saving is $3 \times 300 \times 5 = €4,500$, less than €11,000, and the upgrade stays ahead. The break even is where the five year saving equals €11,000: $11,000 \div (5 \times 300) = 7.3$ changes a year. Foundations: marginal versus average

So the decision turns on a question Siobhán can answer better than any agency: how much will she change this site? WordPress gets the same test, with its own change cost.

The flow runs from the top. Security comes first, because a site without security fixes is a problem today, whatever the strategy. Then comes how much the site must change. If little, upgrading TYPO3 is usually sensible. If a lot, the cost of change goes into the total cost sum, and that decides.

What to ask before touching anything

Before any plan, ask the current agency in writing for the exact version and security status, the list of extensions marked core, third party or custom, a copy of the code repository, who holds the hosting, domain and server accounts, the fallbackType for each language, and any tests and accessibility audits.

Worked example: the answers that change the plan

An example: Siobhán's answers come back. Version 11.5 with no ELTS, so no security releases since October 2024. Four custom extensions. Code available on request, domain in the German company's name. English and French on fallbackType strict. No tests, no audit. Two answers change the plan at once: security moves to this month, and the strict fallback means the English and French sites may be missing pages, worth counting before anyone measures their traffic.

If you would like the wider context of moving into these markets first, the missteps businesses make when they move into Germany and Austria is the place to start. For the decision method in general, see decision theory for founders. And if the German site is also a shop, the platform comparison is its own topic, covered in Solidus, Shopify, Shopware, Magento and WooCommerce for a DACH business.

TYPO3 is not the villain the old version of this article made it. It is a mature, well governed regional system that suits organisations which change slowly and publish in several languages, and suits a business that wants to move fast much less. Knowing which one you are is most of the decision.

Footnotes

1. W3Techs, Distribution of content management systems among websites that use .de as top level domain, Q-Success, 8 November 2026, https://w3techs.com/technologies/segmentation/tld-de-/content_management

2. CMS Census, Universities in Germany, cmscensus.eu, accessed 8 November 2026, https://cmscensus.eu/germany/education-culture-sport/universities

3. TYPO3 Association, The TYPO3 Association, typo3.org, accessed 8 November 2026, https://typo3.org/project/association

4. TYPO3 Documentation Team, TypoScript Explained, docs.typo3.org, accessed 8 November 2026, https://docs.typo3.org/m/typo3/reference-typoscript/main/en-us/Index.html

5. W3Techs, Web technology surveys, methodology section, Q-Success, accessed 8 November 2026, https://w3techs.com/technologies

6. W3Techs, Usage statistics and market share of TYPO3, Q-Success, 8 November 2026, https://w3techs.com/technologies/details/cm-typo3

7. W3Techs, Usage statistics and market share of WordPress, Q-Success, 8 November 2026, https://w3techs.com/technologies/details/cm-wordpress

8. W3Techs, Distribution of content management systems among websites that use .at as top level domain, Q-Success, 8 November 2026, https://w3techs.com/technologies/segmentation/tld-at-/content_management

9. W3Techs, Distribution of content management systems among websites that use .ie as top level domain, Q-Success, 8 November 2026, https://w3techs.com/technologies/segmentation/tld-ie-/content_management

10. W3Techs, Distribution of content management systems among websites that use .ch as top level domain, Q-Success, 8 November 2026, https://w3techs.com/technologies/segmentation/tld-ch-/content_management

11. CMS Census, Landkreise in Germany, cmscensus.eu, accessed 8 November 2026, https://cmscensus.eu/germany/regions-cities/landkreise

12. CMS Census, Federal states in Germany, cmscensus.eu, accessed 8 November 2026, https://cmscensus.eu/germany/regions-cities/federal-states

13. TYPO3 GmbH, Case study: Technische Universität München, typo3.com, 2025, https://typo3.com/customers/case-studies/technische-universitaet-muenchen

14. web-vision, TYPO3 for universities, part 1, web-vision.de, 2024, https://www.web-vision.de/en/typo3-for-universities-part-1.html

15. TYPO3 GmbH, TYPO3 Extended Long Term Support (ELTS), typo3.com, accessed 8 November 2026, https://typo3.com/elts

16. Benni Mack, Announcing TYPO3 v14.3.0 LTS, the next generation, TYPO3 announce, 21 April 2026, https://talk.typo3.org/t/typo3-announce-announcing-typo3-v14-3-0-lts-the-next-generation/6664

17. WordPress, Security, wordpress.org, accessed 8 November 2026, https://wordpress.org/about/security/

18. Ruby on Rails, Maintenance policy for Ruby on Rails, rubyonrails.org, accessed 8 November 2026, https://rubyonrails.org/maintenance

19. TYPO3, Get TYPO3: supported versions, free support and ELTS dates, get.typo3.org, accessed 8 November 2026, https://get.typo3.org/

20. TYPO3 Documentation Team, Frontend Localization Guide: Localized content, version 12.4, docs.typo3.org, https://docs.typo3.org/m/typo3/guide-frontendlocalization/12.4/en-us/LocalizedContent/Index.html

21. WordPress, Multilingual WordPress, Advanced Administration Handbook, developer.wordpress.org, accessed 8 November 2026, https://developer.wordpress.org/advanced-administration/wordpress/multilingual/

22. European Parliament and Council, Directive (EU) 2019/882 on the accessibility requirements for products and services (European Accessibility Act), article 2, EUR Lex, 2019, https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/dir/2019/882/oj

23. Alexa Kreßmann, TYPO3 and its accessibility in the backend, TYPO3 news, 13 February 2022, https://news.typo3.com/article/typo3-and-its-accessibility-in-the-backend

24. TYPO3 Documentation Team, Installing TYPO3 with DDEV, Getting Started, docs.typo3.org, accessed 8 November 2026, https://docs.typo3.org/m/typo3/tutorial-getting-started/main/en-us/Installation/Install.html

25. TYPO3 Documentation Team, Testing, TYPO3 Explained, docs.typo3.org, accessed 8 November 2026, https://docs.typo3.org/m/typo3/reference-coreapi/main/en-us/Testing/Index.html

26. TYPO3 Documentation Team, TYPO3 Workspaces, docs.typo3.org, accessed 8 November 2026, https://docs.typo3.org/c/typo3/cms-workspaces/main/en-us