Short answer: If you judged the web by tech conferences and developer Twitter, you’d think it runs on React, Next.js and Astro. It doesn’t. As of June 2026, about 42% of all websites run on WordPress, roughly two-thirds to 70% run on some content management system, and the single most common piece of code on the web is still jQuery — on 69% of all sites. The modern frameworks everyone talks about are real and growing fast, but they’re a thin slice of what’s actually deployed. Here’s the honest map of what the world’s websites are built with — and where that leaves your choices.
Two layers: what builds the page, and what runs in the browser
“What is a site built with” is really two questions. There’s the CMS or builder — the system that creates and manages the pages (WordPress, Wix, Shopify, or a hand-coded site with none). And there’s the front-end code that runs in the visitor’s browser (jQuery, React, a framework like Next.js or Astro). A WordPress site usually also loads jQuery; a Next.js site is both the builder and the front-end. Keep the two layers separate and the numbers stop being confusing.
Most of the web runs on a CMS — and most of that is WordPress
According to W3Techs, which surveys the most popular sites on the web, here’s the picture on 9 June 2026 — as a share of all websites:
| Platform | % of all websites | % of the CMS market |
|---|---|---|
| No CMS (hand-coded / framework) | 29.5% | — |
| WordPress | 41.9% | 59.4% |
| Shopify | 5.2% | 7.4% |
| Wix | 4.3% | 6.1% |
| Squarespace | 2.5% | 3.5% |
| Joomla | 1.2% | 1.8% |
| Webflow | 0.9% | 1.2% |
| Tilda | 0.8% | 1.2% |
| Duda | 0.7% | 1.1% |
| Drupal | 0.7% | 1.0% |
Two honest caveats. First, “70% of the web uses a CMS” depends on who’s counting: W3Techs puts the no-CMS group at 29.5%, while HTTP Archive’s 2025 Web Almanac — which crawls a different and broader set of real sites — found 54% of sites on a CMS. Different populations, different methods. What both agree on is the headline: WordPress is the majority of the managed web — about 59% of the CMS market by W3Techs, around 64% by HTTP Archive. Everything else is a long tail.
The site builders are the real growth story
The interesting movement isn’t at the top — it’s the hosted builders chipping away underneath. Shopify, Wix, Squarespace, Tilda, Duda and Webflow are all-in-one platforms where the hosting, editor and templates come as one closed package. Add them up and they’re already bigger than every traditional open-source CMS except WordPress combined. They win on “sign up and you’re live by lunch.” The trade-off is the part that doesn’t show up in the share chart: you’re inside a walled garden, and your content is hard to take with you if you ever want to leave.
The front-end and framework layer — by share
Now what actually runs the page in the browser, or builds it on the server. Same source, same date, share of all websites. I’ve added a “what it is” column on purpose: these aren’t the same kind of thing, and they overlap — a Next.js site also counts as React and Node.js — so the column is not meant to add up to 100%.
| Technology | What it is | % of all websites |
|---|---|---|
| jQuery | Browser library (legacy) | 68.7% |
| Bootstrap | CSS/JS UI framework | 15.7% |
| Node.js | Server-side runtime* | 6.4% |
| React | Browser UI framework | 6.1% |
| Next.js | Full-stack framework (on React) | 2.7% |
| Vue.js | Browser UI framework | 0.7% |
| Nuxt | Full-stack framework (on Vue) | 0.7% |
| Astro | Static-site framework | 0.1% |
* Node.js is measured among sites whose web server can be identified; the rest are a share of all sites.
Read the top row again: jQuery, a library most developers consider legacy, runs on more than two-thirds of all websites — largely because WordPress and its plugins still ship it. React, the framework that dominates job listings and conference talks, is on 6.1%. And the modern darlings — Next.js at 2.7%, Astro at 0.1% — are a rounding error next to jQuery. The gap between what developers build new projects with and what the deployed web actually runs is enormous. Both facts are true at once.
Astro and the static-site world: small but exploding
Those last two rows hide the real trend. Static site generators (SSG) — Astro, Hugo, Next.js in static mode, Gatsby, Eleventy — pre-build pages into plain HTML for speed and security. They’re a tiny share today, but the fastest-moving part of the chart.
HTTP Archive’s 2024 Jamstack analysis found fully prerendered sites are about 0.5% of the web. Inside that sliver, Hugo leads (18% of those sites), then Next.js (13%), then Astro at about 5%. But the growth is the story: Astro tripled year over year, the fastest growth of any prerendering framework in the report. (Some tools like Eleventy and SvelteKit leave no fingerprint, so the real numbers run a little higher than any crawl can see.)
So when someone says “everyone’s moving to Astro,” the honest version is: a small but rapidly growing group of new, performance-focused sites is — including this one. This very page is built with Astro. It loads fast and ships almost no JavaScript, which is exactly why we use it for content like this. That’s a deliberate choice, not the default the web is on.
So what should your site be built with?
The data has a clear lesson, and it isn’t “pick the most popular.” It’s: the right stack depends on the site, not on the chart.
- WordPress — the safe default for content-heavy sites that need a non-technical editor. Huge ecosystem, easy to hire for. The cost is maintenance and lock-in risk if you let plugins and a managed host fence you in.
- Hosted builders (Wix / Squarespace / Shopify) — fastest to launch, fine for a simple brochure or a standard store. The cost is the walled garden: limited control and a painful exit.
- Modern frameworks (Astro / Next.js) — fastest and cheapest to host, most secure (no database to hack on a static site), best Core Web Vitals (Google’s page speed-and-experience scores). The cost is that you need a developer to change things; there’s no point-and-click editor by default.
There’s no universally “best” — there’s only the right fit for what your site needs to do, who edits it, and how much you’ll grow.
The calm version
The web isn’t one thing. It’s a huge base of WordPress and jQuery, a fast-growing middle of hosted builders, and a small, sharp edge of modern frameworks that punch above their share. Popularity tells you what’s common, not what’s right for you.
That’s the part we actually care about. We build and host on whatever fits the job — WordPress, Astro, Next.js, plain PHP or Node — on EU servers, billed by one EU company, with your domain in your name and an export you can take anywhere. If you’re not sure which layer your site should live on, that’s the conversation to have before the build. See our web development and managed hosting.