Highlights of the HTTP Archive Web Almanac (#blogPost)

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!

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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. ? :)

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

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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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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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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Only ~20% of sites use source maps? ?

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

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

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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.

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

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

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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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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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10% of sites ship without headings at all. ?

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

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

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

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

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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. :)