What runs the high-DR web in 2026

When commercial SEO tools rank tech adoption they tend to count every host they crawl, which is mostly long tail and parked domains. We tried the opposite cut: take only domains with a Domain Rank of 50 or higher (the high-authority slice of the open web), then count the underlying stack. That gives a much more realistic picture of what the actually-trafficked web is built with, not what is sitting in DNS.

The detection rule is also strict. We only count technology if there is strong evidence in the rendered HTML, the loaded scripts, the response headers, or the meta tags. Mentions of a framework name in a blog post or a docs site do not qualify. This filter eliminates the false positives that make the long-tail stats useless.

The shares below are within the relevant detection universe (that is, the CMS share is computed against the population of high-DR sites where any CMS was detected with strong evidence). We use shares rather than absolute counts because share is the load-bearing metric: the relative distribution is stable across crawl coverage, while raw counts scale with sample size.

A few things stand out.

Content management

Share among high-DR sites where any CMS was detected:

WordPress is not just the leading CMS. It runs roughly seven out of every ten high-authority CMS deployments, more than every other detectable CMS combined and then some. The WordPress ecosystem also dominates the page-builder, caching, and SEO-plugin tables below.

If you are building tooling for the SEO market, this is the answer to the question of which platform to support first. The answer is the same it was in 2015. The longer story is that the WordPress installed base on high-authority sites is still growing in absolute terms even as the share of new sites going to alternative platforms (Webflow, Framer, Ghost, self-hosted Next.js) increases. Most of the new high-authority entries we see in our crawl are still WordPress.

Web servers

Share among high-DR sites where any web server was detected:

Nginx narrowly leads Apache, with about a four-percentage-point gap. Combined, the two run roughly four out of every five high-authority web servers. The surprise here is LiteSpeed.

LiteSpeed is a commercial drop-in replacement for Apache, popular with shared hosting providers because it handles WordPress traffic better on constrained machines. It runs about one in twelve high-authority web servers, larger than the entire IIS share. If you only follow developer discussion on Twitter or Hacker News you might never have heard of it. Looking at our shared-hosting providers' default stacks suggests this is because LiteSpeed's growth happened entirely inside the WordPress and shared-host world: Hostinger, NameCheap, A2 Hosting, GreenGeeks, and a half-dozen others ship LiteSpeed by default. The stat reflects a slow, quiet replacement of Apache underneath WordPress.

OpenResty (the Nginx + Lua bundle popular for API gateways and CDN edges) runs roughly the same share as IIS does. That one would have been unimaginable a decade ago.

CDN and edge

Share among high-DR sites where any CDN was detected:

Cloudflare fronts roughly two out of every three CDN deployments on the high-DR web. The combined AWS + Google Cloud share is a bit over a fifth. The long tail of medium-authority sites picks Cloudflare almost universally because of the free tier.

The implication is that any global outage of Cloudflare's edge takes down a much larger share of the visible web than people generally believe.

Server-side languages and frameworks

This category is genuinely hard to measure as shares because most languages do not produce a reliable HTTP fingerprint (Python, Ruby, and Node tend to be invisible without an explicit X-Powered-By header). What we can say with confidence about the high-DR sample is the relative ordering when a fingerprint is detectable:

• PHP detection is roughly 3.6× larger than ASP.NET. PHP shows up in response headers, set-cookie patterns, or default error pages on the vast majority of high-DR sites where any backend language is detectable.
• Next.js / Vercel detection is roughly half the size of ASP.NET. Next is the largest "modern" stack in our high-DR sample, but it is still smaller than the legacy Microsoft estate.
• Ruby on Rails detection is one-quarter of Next.js. It still fingerprints on a meaningful number of high-authority sites, mostly long-running publications and SaaS that have not migrated.

PHP's reputation for being legacy is unrelated to its actual market share.

Page builders and the WordPress ecosystem

Share within high-DR sites where any page builder was detected:

Elementor runs roughly six out of every ten high-DR page-builder deployments, which makes it the single most-installed builder on the authoritative web by a wide margin.

If you write a piece of content marketing and want one of these stacks to ship a "share" or "embed" feature for it, Elementor is the highest-leverage target by a factor of three.

Analytics

Share within high-DR sites where any analytics tool was detected:

The combined Google Analytics ecosystem (raw GA + Site Kit + MonsterInsights) covers around 80% of the detected analytics share. The Site Kit number is worth highlighting because it is the WordPress-native way to install GA, and its share suggests one in three high-DR sites with detectable analytics runs them through a WordPress plugin rather than a hand-edited script tag.

LinkedIn Insight Tag at 7.7% of detected analytics is interesting because it is a B2B-only signal. That share is a reasonable proxy for the slice of the high-DR web that is B2B-focused with paid LinkedIn ads.

The honest caveat: client-side analytics is increasingly absent at the high end. EU consent compliance and anti-tracker browser shares have made server-side analytics meaningfully popular, and those do not fingerprint through HTML inspection. The shares above describe what is visible, not what exists.

Caching

Share within high-DR sites where any caching layer was detected:

LiteSpeed Cache and WP Rocket combined account for roughly seven out of ten detected caching deployments, almost all of them WordPress-side. Varnish is the only non-WordPress major caching layer with meaningful adoption, mostly on enterprise publishing.

Hosting platforms

Share within high-DR sites where any PaaS / hosting platform was detected:

WP Engine and Vercel run the two cleanest detection signals. Vercel's share has roughly doubled in the last 18 months, purely on Next.js momentum. WP Engine is essentially flat year-on-year but still nearly twice Vercel's share at the high-authority end.

What you can do with this

Three takeaways, framed as relative leverage:

1. WordPress is still the highest-leverage integration target. Any tool that ships a WordPress plugin reaches roughly 72% of the high-DR CMS surface. No alternative comes close.
2. Cloudflare is the highest-leverage edge integration target. A Cloudflare Worker integration covers around two-thirds of the high-DR CDN surface. Anything else is a small fraction.
3. PHP is alive. New tooling that does not run on PHP / Linux / MySQL excludes most of the high-authority web by construction. This is a fact to plan around, not a fact to dispute.

See it yourself

This data lives in our crawl analytics database and is available through the REST API and the hosted MCP server. You can query the technology fingerprint for any specific domain through the REST API or the /domains/ view.

For the companion piece on backlink concentration, see The 100 most-linked-to domains on the web.