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Recent evidence points to two different pictures of web development: developers responding to Stack Overflow’s 2026 survey report widespread use of web technologies, while HTTP Archive measurements show that only 48% of mobile websites and 56% of desktop websites achieved good overall Core Web Vitals in 2025. These figures describe different populations—survey respondents and measured websites—so they should not be combined into a single measure of the web development market.

What do developers report using in 2026?

Stack Overflow’s 2026 Developer Survey measures what respondents said they used or worked with, not the share of websites built with a technology. In its overview, 62.7% of respondents said their role involved building, maintaining, or learning about web technologies in the past year. That was 10,176 responses to that question.

The survey also reports JavaScript as its most-used programming language for the twelfth consecutive year. That describes the survey’s respondents, not a census of developers or websites. The following figures are respondent shares in separate survey questions:

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Survey question Technology Share reported Population and period
Web frameworks and technologies Node.js 46.4% Stack Overflow 2026 survey; 10,281 respondents to this question; extensive development work over the past year
Web frameworks and technologies React 41.5% Stack Overflow 2026 survey; 10,281 respondents to this question; extensive development work over the past year
Web frameworks and technologies Next.js 20.6% Stack Overflow 2026 survey; 10,281 respondents to this question; extensive development work over the past year
Programming languages JavaScript 62.0% Stack Overflow 2026 survey respondents to the programming-language question
Programming languages HTML/CSS 58.2% Stack Overflow 2026 survey respondents to the programming-language question
Programming languages TypeScript 43.8% Stack Overflow 2026 survey respondents to the programming-language question

The survey overview also says 71.8% of respondents used a large language model (LLM) in the prior 12 months. This is a reported behavior, not evidence that AI tools caused a change in web development or will determine future adoption.

How well do websites meet Core Web Vitals?

The HTTP Archive’s 2025 Web Almanac, published in 2026, reports good overall Core Web Vitals for 48% of mobile websites and 56% of desktop websites. Its analysis combines HTTP Archive measurements with real-user data from Chrome UX Report; these are not simply laboratory test results. The Almanac’s metrics are generally based on July 2025 data, so the percentages describe that measurement period rather than a live count of sites today.

The Web Almanac describes Core Web Vitals as Google’s main metrics for understanding how a webpage feels to real users. Its stated good thresholds are:

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Metric What it measures Good threshold in the 2025 Web Almanac
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The 48% mobile and 56% desktop results are overall pass rates, not separate scores for each metric. When comparing performance figures, keep the device category, metric, threshold, and observation year together. The chapter also notes that reporting for LCP and INP expanded beyond Chrome to other browsers over the prior year.

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What did the 2025 Web Almanac measure?

The HTTP Archive says the 2025 Web Almanac analyzed 16.2 million websites and processed 244 TB of data. The project’s dataset is based primarily on July 2025 measurements unless a chapter says otherwise. The report provides a large-scale view of measured websites, but its population and methods differ from an opt-in developer survey.

What do the accessibility findings show?

The Web Almanac’s 2025 Accessibility chapter reports that roughly 1.6% of desktop sites included captions in the chapter’s analysis. Caption presence is one narrow indicator; it is not a comprehensive accessibility score and cannot establish how accessible those sites are overall.

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How should you interpret technology statistics?

  • Survey adoption is about people who answered. Stack Overflow’s percentages describe respondents to particular questions and, where stated, their reported use over the past year.
  • Website measurements are about sites, not developers. The HTTP Archive analyzes websites and page behavior. W3Techs likewise describes its technology statistics as usage on websites, not individual pages.
  • Do not merge unlike denominators. A framework’s respondent share cannot be read as the percentage of websites using it, nor directly ranked against a website-level measurement.
  • Check the date and measurement type. The Almanac’s reported performance results are based mainly on July 2025 measurements, while the report was published in 2026. Field data and laboratory tests are not interchangeable.

Together, the 2026 Stack Overflow survey and 2025 Web Almanac provide useful but different snapshots: one of developers’ reported practices, the other of measured websites. They do not amount to a complete census of the global developer workforce or of every site on the web.

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