Review of W3Techs report about best web technologies on 2020

In my previous post, I reviewed the W3Techs report, particularly WordPress. Now I think it is convenient to make a detail, or summary, of the entire report.


W3Techs has published its list with the web technologies of 2020, one in which the analysis firm collects every year not the most popular, but those that have become the most popular throughout that year. And although as with practically all the statistics about the use of technologies offered by companies that are dedicated to it, the results are not an exact reflection of reality, they are the best indicator that we have.

The same thing happens with W3Techs: the methodology they use is based solely on the data of the most popular websites in the world according to the rankings of Alexa and Tranco (up to 10 million and one million respectively), they take into account all the technologies although only are used on a site page or subdomain and discount redirects. That is, they do not cover even a small fraction of the Internet, but they are representative of the technological trends of the sector.

Likewise, W3Techs not only publishes this annual list, it also maintains a list that is updated daily with the total popularity ranking, and not measuring the growth of technology adoption from one year to the next. But we are starting the year and in order not to lose tradition, today we focus on the web technologies of 2020 or, properly said, the web technologies that grew the most in 2020. Surprises? There are some, but we are not going to go through the entire list either.


2020 web technologies

Before seeing the results, we emphasize once again that the technologies listed below are not the most popular in global terms, although there are those that do coincide, but rather the ones that experienced the greatest growth throughout 2020. The complete list You can find it in the W3Techs report. We focus on the most prominent categories, starting with …
2020 operating system

The usual: Unix is ​​number one, and by Unix we also understand Linux, which in turn competes in this ranking in different distributions. But this is how they do it, among other things, because not all servers allow us to know what specific distribution they are using. So, in second place is Ubuntu and third … OpenBSD.

2020 web server

If last year LiteSPeed was the option that took the cake, it takes a step back to leave the place of honor to Cloudflare Server, the iteration of the most popular CDN on the Internet that, as you can see, aspires to much more. In third place, the number one regular in the newspaper: Nginx.

2020 content management system

In this section there shouldn’t be any surprises either … and there isn’t: WordPress sweeps up both daily and annually and as it has been doing for more than a decade, the crown is yours. They are followed by Shopify and Bitrix.

2020 JavaScript Library

One of the basic elements of any modern server is the chosen JavaScript library, and although there is no jealousy here because everyone can use whatever they want, jQuery regains the position that Bootstrap took from it a few years ago. They are followed by Polyfill.io and… Bootstrap.

2020 programming language

And as for server programming languages, one more year Ruby is the one that has experienced the greatest growth, followed by JavaScript, which as we have seen is usually used more in modules, but which is also present in a multitude of functions. The third in question is Scala.

We leave it that way because it doesn’t make much sense to go on either: Cloudflare stands out in a couple more categories, not a trace of Let’s Encrypt in the category of certificate authorities, Gmail is the undisputed number one when it comes to email servers, Facebook Pixel begins to make a niche among the most popular analytics tools … We are left with the above, where almost everything is open source software.

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