Web technologies of the year 2013

Summary: We compiled the list of web technologies that saw the largest increase in usage in the last year.

We have published the top rising technologies of a year before (2010, 2011, 2012), however we changed the format this year by determining winners per category.

To identify the winners, we compared the number of sites using a technology on Jan 1, 2013 with the corresponding number on Jan 1, 2014. 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 10 million sites, see technology surveys for more details.

These are the technologies that gained most sites in 2013:

Content Management System of the Year

WordPress

WordPress is the clear leader in this category and has also been the fastest growing CMS for a long time.

Recent winners

2012 WordPress

2011 WordPress

2010 WordPress

Server-side Programming Language of the Year

PHP

With a market share of over 80%, no other language even comes close to PHP in website development. The fact that this share is still growing is quite amazing.

Recent winners

2012 PHP

2011 PHP

2010 PHP

JavaScript Library of the Year

jQuery

jQuery is the de-facto standard for client-side JavaScript development to an extent that people wonder why it has not yet became part of the language.

Recent winners

2012 jQuery

2011 jQuery

SSL Certificate Authority of the Year

GlobalSign

GlobalSign only ranks 4th in that category, but it has gained more sites in 2013 than any other certificate provider.

Social Widget of the Year

Pinterest

Pinterest moved into the top 5 social widgets only recently, but it is the social service that more site started to use in 2013 than any of the bigger social networks.

Recent winners

2012 Facebook

Web Server of the Year

Nginx

2013 was a fantastic year for Nginx: It overtook Microsoft IIS as the #2 web server, and it even became the #1 server among top 1000 sites.

Recent winners

2012 Nginx

2011 Nginx

2010 Nginx

Operating System of the Year

Ubuntu

Due to its constant growth, Ubuntu became the #2 Linux distribution used on web servers.

Recent winners

2012 Ubuntu

2011 Ubuntu

2010 Windows

JavaScript Content Delivery Network of the Year

jQuery CDN

Benefiting from the growth of jQuery, the jQuery CDN became the fastest growing JavaScript CDN on the web.

Traffic Analysis Tool of the Year

Yandex.Metrika

The Russian Yandex.Metrika ranks third in that category, and it gained more sites than any other service.

Recent winners

2012 Google Analytics

2011 Google Analytics

2010 Google Analytics

Advertising Network of the Year

AdRoll

AdRoll is a relatively new network that very quickly became the #3 ad network on the web. The growth in 2013 was quite spectacular.

Recent winners

2012 DoubleClick

2011 Google AdSense

Congratulations to all the winners for their extraordinary achievements in the last year.

Share this page

This entry is closed for comments.