Top 10 rising web technologies in 2011

Posted by Matthias Gelbmann on 3 January 2012 in News, Facebook, Google +1, Google AdSense, Google Analytics, JavaScript, JQuery, Nginx, PHP, Ubuntu, UTF-8, WordPress, XHTML

We started last year to present the top rising technologies. Let's see what has changed since then.

To compile this list, we compared the number of sites using a technology on Jan 1, 2011 with the corresponding number on Jan 1, 2012. We use the difference of these numbers, rather than a percentage, because that would favor technologies with a tiny user base at the beginning of the year. As in all our surveys, we restrict the numbers to the top 1 million sites, see technology surveys for more details.

These are the technologies that gained most top 1 million sites in 2011:

1. jQuery
   
   jQuery gained an incredible 145.300 additional sites amongst the top 1 million websites. That means that every single day of the year, 398 sites started using it. jQuery is now used by 42.8% of all websites. Many see it as the de-facto standard for JavaScript libraries with a market share of 84.1%.
    
2. UTF-8
   
   UTF-8 was leading last year's list, and it continues to be more and more popular. An additional 82.600 sites use it now. More that 2/3 of all websites switched to that character encoding by now.
    
3. Google Analytics
   
   The Google web analytics tool is now used by more than half of all websites. It added 57,900 new top 1 million sites last year. While not every privacy activist will be happy with that, it is a great achievement for Google.
    
4. Nginx
   
   Nginx is now used by 10% of all sites (and by almost one quarter of the top 1,000 sites). 41,200 sites switched to Nginx in 2011.
    
5. WordPress
   
   WordPress increased its user base by 26,800 sites and continues to dominate the CMS surveys with over 54% market share.
    
6. JavaScript
   
   JavaScript has always been the most important client-side programming language on the web. Another 26.500 sites started using it in 2011. It is almost a surprise that there are still 8.9% of the sites not using it.
    
7. XHTML
   
   In 2009 I predicted that the use of XHTML will start to decline. I was wrong, and XHTML is still gaining sites at the rate of 26,400 last year.
    
8. PHP
   
   More than 77% of all websites are written in PHP. 20,000 more top 1 million sites use PHP than a year ago. The increasing use of content management systems contributes to this trend, as 13 out of the top 14 CMS's are written in PHP.
    
9. Ubuntu
   
   Ubuntu made it in this list for the second time in a row. It is the fastest growing web server Linux distribution with 19,500 additional sites in 2011.
    
10. Google AdSense
    
    The second Google technology in this top 10 list is the dominating advertising network. It has a 77.9% market share after adding 13.000 sites last year.

Please note, that this list obviously does not contain technologies that we started monitoring only during 2011. The most important missing technologies are social widgets. The Google +1 button has only been introduced in 2011 and is already used by 100.000 top 1 million sites. That would have been enough for rank 2. Similarly, the Facebook like button gained an estimated 90.000 sites in 2011, which would have been rank 3.

Special mentioning goes to two interesting developments outside the top 10:

• The Brazilian top level domain (.br) gained 4.000 top 1 mil sites and was the fastest growing top level domain in 2011.
• Russian is the fastest growing content language with 7.200 additional sites sites in 2011.

5 comments

Fadi El-Eter on 5 January 2012

It's weird to see PHP at number 8 of this list. What are these top millions websites using as a programming language if not PHP. I know that there are ASP.net and python, but PHP definitely has the lion's share.

Reply by author Matthias Gelbmann on 5 January 2012

PHP is indeed the most used server-side language. You can see the complete statistics here: http://w3techs.com/technologies/overview/programming_language/all

sohan on 6 February 2012

Actually this list is really a very essential one list for technology and web developing related person. I love blogging and use PHP, Wordpress, joomla, Google adsense. But all are essential.

Anonymous user on 17 October 2012

It would be better if one of the websites post all the technologies in a serial order which makes easy in finding all the technologies in one single page

Reply by author Matthias Gelbmann on 17 October 2012

Showing all technologies in one huge list is not really feasible due to the number of technologies that we cover. However, specific cross-category subsets could make sense. Thank you for the suggestion.

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