I love me some good web research reports. I’m a sucker for them. HTTP Archive’s Web Almanac is one report I look forward to every year, and I know I’m not alone there. It’s one of those highly-anticipated publications on the state of the web, chock-full of well-documented findings about millions of live websites — 17.2 million in this edition! — from page content, to performance, to accessibility, to UX, to… well, let’s just get to it.
It just came out, so there’s no way I’ve read through all 15 chapters, let alone digested and reflected on everything in it. Really, I just want you to be aware that it’s out. That said, it’s hard for me to resist sharing at least a few notable stats that hit me and that I’ll be sure to dig into.
Some highlights:
- New
text-wrapvalues are showing up! It’s small, but not surprising for features that only shipped as far back as 2023. Specifically, I’m looking at thebalance(2.67%) andpretty(1.71%) values. - Variable fonts are no longer a novelty. “How popular are variable fonts? This year, 39.4% of desktop websites and 41.3% of mobile websites used at least one variable font on their pages. In other words, now about 4 in 10 sites are using variable fonts.”
- Why can’t we nail down color contrast?! Only 30% of sites meet WCAG guidelines, and though that’s a number that’s trending up (21% in 2020), that’s a sorry stat.
- Removing focus styles is an epidemic. A whopping 67% of sights remove focus outlines despite WCAG’s requirement that “Any keyboard operable user interface has a mode of operation where the keyboard focus indicator is visible.”
- Many images are apparently decorative. At least, that’s what 30% of sites are suggesting by leaving the
altattribute empty. But if we consider that 14% of sites leave off the attribute completely, we’re looking at roughly 44% of sites that aren’t describing their visual content. On that note, your images probably are not decorative. - ARIA labels are everywhere. We’re looking at 70% usage (29% on buttons). This doesn’t mean anything in and of itself. It could be a good thing, but could also be an issue without proper usage.
- The CMS landscape is largely unchanged. I mean, WordPress is still the dominant force, and that’s no dang surprise. At this point, its expansion wavers between a couple percentage points every year. “These changes suggest that WordPress is shifting from a focus on expansion to one on stabilization.” That’s a good thing.
- Bloat, bloat, bloat. “In July 2015, the median mobile home page was a meager 845 KB. As of July 2025, the same median page is now 2,362 KB. The page decade brought a 202.8% increase.” In a perfect world where we’re all super conscious about page weight, I’d say we oughta aim for less than half that total.
- JavaScript be heavy. Images are heaviest, of course, but 697 KB of JavaScript is a lot to stomach. That massive growth in page weight since 2015 is more support that this was a lost decade we must reckon with.
HTTP Archive 2025 Web Almanac originally published on CSS-Tricks, which is part of the DigitalOcean family. You should get the newsletter.
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