Highlights of web technology surveys, April 2010: Technologies used by successful sites

Posted by Matthias Gelbmann on 1 April 2010 in News

Different sites have different needs, so that it can be expected that high traffic sites use different technologies. It is interesting to see where these differences actually are.

• Content management systems: Wordpress is dominating overall and also amongst the top performing sites, but it's market share is significantly lower. The two tools that grab that share are vBulletin and Drupal. Both of these tools have a high focus on community features. These features seem to be well needed within the top sites.
   
• Server-side programming languages: Java has a much higher share in the top ranking sites. It's almost like Java is only used by the top sites. Java's usage is still behind ASP.NET and well behind PHP, but the differences are much lower.
   
• Client-side programming languages: Flash is used a little bit less within the top 1.000 sites, but the difference is not significant. If Google would introduce Flash on its search sites, that would look different.
   
• Markup languages: XHTML is used somewhat more by high ranking sites, but not much more.
   
• Character encodings: UTF-8 is used more by the top sides, and all other encodings are used less with the notable exception of GB2312. That is a clear indication that Chinese is over-represented in the top sites.
   
• Web servers: Nginx has a significantly higher share in the top performing sites, whereas Apache and IIS are used less, but they are still ahead of Nginx in market share. Nevertheless, webmasters seem to agree with Nginx's claim to be a high-performance server. If you calculate the sum of the top 3 web servers, you see that it's only 80% in the top 1.000 where the same figure is over 95% overall. The difference is mostly Google, which uses its own server technology and which is well represented in the top 1.000.
   
• Operating systems: Windows is more popular amongst the top sites compared to the overall statistics, but Unix is still leading. If we look at the Linux distributions, we see Red Hat leading in the top 10.000 sites where Debian is the overall leader. The differences here are small, though.
   
• Traffic analysis tools: Two of the most popular tools are used much more frequently by the top sites: Quantcast and Omniture. That has an impact on Google Analytics's share, which is dominating, however.
   
• Top level domains: As expected, the generic .com domain is having a higher share and all others less with the exception of .jp and .cn. Pure Asian sites seem to do quite well on a global scale.

The differences in technologies are in some cases quite large. It would be foolish, of course, to think that changing the technology can make a site more successful. The fact that none of the popular technologies disappears completely from the statistics when looking at the top performing sites is an indication that all these tools are capable of powering successful sites. It's just that some seem to me more suitable to do so.

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Please note, that all trends and figures mentioned in that article are valid at the time of writing. Our surveys are updated frequently, and these trends and figures are likely to change over time.

4 comments

Anonymous user on 7 April 2010

You mention Java as most important server-side programming language. Do you mean JavaScript as standardized in ECMA-262 or Java the programming language developed years ago by Sun Microsystems? 

Reply by author Matthias Gelbmann on 7 April 2010

Server-side, that is Java as developed by Sun. Client-side, we have the dominance of Javascript, of course.

Please note, that Java is not the most popular server-side language. What is remarkable, however, is the fact that it is so much more popular amongst top ranking sites.

Anonymous user on 10 April 2010

Cloaking may account for at least some of the "under-representation" of Windows in the top sites?

Reply by author Matthias Gelbmann on 11 April 2010

Cloaking in this case would mean sites providing our robot with different information than other visitors. I don't see why any site would do that. A site can always decide to hide operating system information from its visitors, but then they would most likely hide it from all visitors.

Top ranking sites are indeed hiding more information than other sites (that is just a perception, I don't have any statistics to support that right now). But that would not be a reason why the surveys are biased in favor or against one specific operating system.

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