Highlights of the HTTP Archive Web Almanac

I spent my Sunday reading the HTTP archive web almanac and shared the surprising and interesting pieces in a Twitter thread. I like to own my data – so here we have the thread on my own site. Enjoy!

Spending my Sunday morning reading the Web Almanac sharing internet stats and analyzing HTTP Archive data for 2019.

I'll share facts and stats that I think are interesting in a thread. 👇 :)

# Only ~80% of sites compress their JavaScript files. 😲

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Edited: I tweeted initially that it's 65% because I missed the fact that gzip and brotli should count together. 🙈

# jQuery still powers 85% of the crawled sites

It always feels like React/Vue/Angular are all over the internet – they're not... jQuery still powers 85% of the crawled sites. 😲

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# React powers 5% of the crawled sites

The numbers for sites using "cutting-edge" frameworks are relatively low with React being the most popular with ~5% on desktop.

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# ES modules are barely used

Even though the ES Module support is quite good these days they are not really used.

~1% is surprisingly low because you can use a fallback strategy shipping a single bundle using the `nomodule` attribute and use modules for supporting browsers today.

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# Low usage of source maps in production

Only ~20% of sites use source maps? 😲

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# CSS flexbox and grid usage

Roughly 50% of sites use flexbox – only 2% use grid.

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# The highest found z-index value

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# Usage of responsive images

Only 20% of sites make use of responsive images...

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# Usage of the alt attribute on images

No surprise here, but yeah... image alt attributes are not used as much as they should. :/

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Edited: As Boris Schapira pointed out, images can be hidden from assistive technology by providing an empty alt attribute ( alt="" ). This fact was not taken into consideration by the Almanac and makes the statistic meaningless.

# Usage of font-display

26% of the pages use font-display. 😲 That's surprisingly high in my opinion. Because the support is not super-duper yet. I wonder how big google fonts' influence is in this trend. 🙈

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# HTTPS adoption

Honestly, I expected fewer sites being served over a secure connection. 80% of sites ship with https these days.

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# HSTS adoption

12 - 14% of sites use HSTS to ensure they are only accessible by supporting browsers via HTTPS. This is also higher then I expected. 😲

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# CSP adoption

I got this statistic by myself recently, but it's still sooooo low. 😿

Only roughly 5% of crawled sites use Content-Security-Policy (CSP).

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# The state of contrast issues

4 of 5 sites ship with color contrast issues. I really wish that we get better at this. :/

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# The often missing language attribute

26% of the pages don't specify the language of their content. This can trouble text-to-speech technology like screenreaders.

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# Accessible forms

4 of 5 forms don't ship with labels for their input elements. :/ I'm used to these bad numbers, but well... filling out forms can be tough for everybody (even tech people), we really have to get better at this. :/

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# Missing headings

10% of sites ship without headings at all. 😲

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# Too short title elements

Google shows 50-60 characters in their search results. Generally speaking, the used title length is not optimal across the web. (at least for google)

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# Service worker adoption

Service workers are mainstream, right? 🙈 Not really... Only 0.44% of the crawled sites register a service worker.

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# The jumpy state of websites

How often do we click the wrong thing because something moved around? Too often.. Jumpy pages are the standard... :/

2 of 3 pages have a huge content shift while loading.

CLS stands for Cumulative Layout Shift – more info.

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# Big enough touch targets

Speaking about tapping the wrong thing. Only 34% of the pages include big enough buttons and links...

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# Wordpress' CMS domination

Wordpress usage is still massive. 75% of sites using a CMS are running on wordpress.

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# Page weight and number of requests of CMS sites

CMS pages are heavy and make many requests... I did Wordpress development in the past and that makes sense thinking of the audience and users of e.g. wordpress. "Just install another plugin"...

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# CDN adoption

HTML is mainly served from its origin server (80%). Most used CDN is cloudflare (10%). 😲

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# Overall page weight

I thought the median value for page weight would be higher these days. :D On desktop it's 1.9MB and on mobile, it's 1.7MB. It's still fairly high though imo. 🙈 (and median is clearly only one piece of the puzzle)

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And that's it. I highly recommend to check it out! It's a very fascinating and interesting read about the state of the internet. :)