Percentage of Sites Using HTML5
It’s obvious that HTML5 is being embraced to a certain extent, but how many Web sites have really converted? There’s no way to get an exact number, but we can get a good idea of the progress being made by taking a look at the most popular sites on the Web.
In order to get a picture of how many sites are making the moving, I decided to start a quarterly report called the HTML Census take a look at the 100 most trafficked sites for September, as ranked by Alexa. To get a broader view, I eliminated sites that were listed multiple times under various domain extensions and included the next domain on the list. For example, Google.com is included in this data, but Google.co.uk and Google.com.mx have been excluded since they all use the same code.
My Findings
What my analysis showed is that 34% of the sites on Alexa’s Top-100 list for September 2011 were using HTML5 to markup their homepages. Let’s first take a moment to look at the makeup of the Web sites that are among the 100 most visited on the internet.
- At 17%, Social Media sites held more spots than any other industry.
- Not far behind were Technology mainstays, at 13% – these are mainly sites that offer software downloads and support, like Mozilla.org, Microsoft.com and QQ.com.
- 13% of the listings were held by Search Engines.
- Adult, Entertainment, and News Web sites each came in at 7% of the sites in the top 100.
- The rest is comprised of sites from Online Storage, Shopping and other industries.
What I found, as you’ve probably already seen in the image above, is that approximately one-third of the Internet’s Top-100 Web sites are currently using HTML5; that portion comprised largely of Social Media and Search Engine sites.
The full 4-page report with data is available in PDF format for download. If you can think of any ways in which this report can be improved for next quarter, please send me a tweet or leave a comment!
Does this number surprise you? If so, would you have expected it to be higher, or lower?
