Some Surprising Trends in Website Development

Here are some surprising trends in website development based on the top 1 million websites, as reported by builtwith.com as of October 2022:

1. jQuery is still huge and is increasing in popularity! According to BuiltWith, jQuery’s usage rate has continued to climb. Only recently, has its usage declined, and that decline matches WordPress’ decline almost exactly, which, is to say, it looks like jQuery is going strong!
   
   
2. Wix is up; Squarespace is down. I don’t use either of these platforms much, but, despite all the podcast ad buys, it seems like Wix has taken the lead!
   
3. Shopify is up up up! I very much prefer Shopify to WooCommerce for times where selling stuff is more important than SEO (Shopify sucks at SEO, whereas WooCommerce gets all the SEO goodness of WordPress). So it’s no surprise that Shopify is racking up more and more users:
   
4. Ruby On Rails is dying, whereas Angular and Laravel are doing pretty well:
   
   
5. Mailchimp sucks now, and its stats illustrate that fact. It used to be that when I needed a quick email campaign set up for a customer with a very reasonable free tier, I’d recommend Mailchimp. Now I tell them, “Anything but Mailchimp.” Mailchimp used to do one thing and do it well: send small business email blasts. Now it’s a customer relationship manager, a postcard-mailing company, an e-commerce stats company, and a lead-management system – Blech! I can’t help but think they completely-lost their focus and followed the money to Big Business pastures, leaving us small businesses in the lurch and dust. For example, they started nickel-and-diming for everything under the sun – something that small businesses don’t have much of a stomach for. Thankfully, there are lots of alternatives, and many are now better at doing email blasts than Mailchimp.
   
   
6. Zoho’s usage is going through the roof! Zoho offers a free alternative to LastPass, Google Business/GSuite, Mailchimp, and many other products out there that businesses use daily. They do it in a smart, mostly-compartmentalized way that I mostly like (their customer support and crm products being exceptions to the rule). With simple-to-use products that are cheaper than competitor products, it’s no wonder they are rocking it:
   
   
7. PHP is down down down. Sadly, my coding language of choice, PHP, is down on its luck. That said, it still is the engine behind WordPress and therefore the unbeknownst tool of choice for most small businesses. It’s not going anywhere and still powers over 27 million websites, which is a huge number (about 25x Ruby on Rails’ totals, for example).
   

Well, I could spend all day on this sort of comparative data dive, but I’ve got work to do, people! Please give ol’ BuiltWith.com a looksie, and let me know what surprises you!