Two Measurements, One Truth
When we published 'The Two Webs' — showing that top 10K sites are 51% modern while the broad web is 5% modern — it was our data alone. Now Cloudflare, independently, measuring from the traffic side rather than the crawl side, confirms the same pattern. The top of the web is modernizing. The long tail isn't.
Why the Numbers Differ
Cloudflare scans the 5,000 most-trafficked domains through their network. These are the Stripes, BBCs, and Amazons of the web — sites with engineering teams, migration budgets, and performance pressure. WordPress is 47% there because many have migrated to Next.js, React, and custom stacks.
We scan 10 million sites from Common Crawl — the entire crawlable web including the long tail of small businesses, personal blogs, restaurant menus, and abandoned sites. WordPress is 74.3% there because the long tail never migrates. The local dentist's website from 2014 is still running WordPress 4.x. Nobody will ever migrate it. It just sits there, accumulating CVEs.
External Validation
This is the first time our framework distribution data has been cross-validated by an independent source at scale. Cloudflare measures from the traffic side (requests hitting their network). We measure from the crawl side (HTML signatures in Common Crawl archives). Different methodology, different sample, same conclusion: the web is split between a modernizing elite and a static, legacy-dominated majority.
