WordPress at 2M detections: 73.0% (Source: WebPulse Common Crawl scan.)
The Number Moved
We published a story called '73% — The Number That Never Moves.' From 2M to 8.4M detections, WordPress held at exactly 73.0%. We called it a structural constant. Then we hit 10 million. And 73% became 74.3%. The number moved — and it moved in the wrong direction for anyone hoping the web was modernizing.
Why It Moved at 10M
The first 8 million detections sampled the near-tail of the web — the sites most accessible to Common Crawl, the domains with more links, more traffic, more visibility. The last 2 million reached deeper into the long tail: smaller sites, older sites, regional sites, sites that barely get crawled. And those sites are even more WordPress-dominated than the near-tail. The deeper you scan, the more WordPress you find.
Legacy Gained. Modern Lost.
It wasn't just WordPress. Joomla went UP — from 2.8% to 3.5%. The long tail carries more Joomla than the near-tail. Meanwhile, Next.js went DOWN from 3.0% to 2.6%. Shopify corrected from 9.6% to 7.8%. Modern and platform frameworks are concentrated at the top. The deeper you go, the more legacy you find.
The 5% Reality
Our '6% Reality' story — which showed modern frameworks combined at 6.4% of detected sites — is now the 5% Reality. At 10 million detections, all modern frameworks combined account for approximately 5.0% of detected sites. The web is even more legacy than we reported. Every additional million sites we scan pushes the modern share down, not up. The conversation about modern frameworks is about an even thinner slice of the web than we thought.
