Web Development Trends 2023: Learn Which Way the Wind Blows for Better Business Results

The web development world is evolving at a breathtaking pace. New technologies and tools are cropping up like mushrooms in a rainy fall. Each offers innovative features that make web solutions more efficient and user friendly. 

Digital agencies, web development companies, and freelancers need to follow the latest web development trends to stay ahead of the competition and engage more customers or clients. 

If you want to know what web technology or platform is the next “big thing” that will enable you to expand your business faster and make it more profitable, you should find our review of the top web development trends to follow in 2023 very helpful. 

Unlike similar reviews that mostly draw general conclusions based on rather vague statistics, we collected detailed data for specific technologies so that you could get a more accurate picture. 

How and Where We Gathered the Data 

Before we begin discussing the web development trends, let us explain how and where we obtained the data for our review. 

1. We researched two popular analytical websites in the field of software development  – builtwith.com and w3techs.com. 
2. We explored around 30 websites of companies that provide web development services. 
3. We used Google Trends – a tool that evaluates the popularity of specific Google search terms based on real-time data, considering the time, location, and season of the search. 
4. We studied the results of recent StackOverFlow surveys regarding the best web development platforms. 

Note that we focused our attention on the most common web development solutions and platforms rather than on software development solutions in general. Specifically, we put the following areas in the spotlight:  

• JavaScript frameworks and libraries 
• CMSs
• No-code/low-code solutions 

Now, without any further ado, let’s get started. 

Top Web Development Trends to Follow in 2023

JavaScript Frameworks and Libraries 

JavaScript libraries and frameworks greatly simplify the task of creating fast, well-performing, and highly interactive websites and web applications. 

We have seen the emergence of multiple JS frameworks over the past decade or so. Some took off at once, becoming wildly popular among the development community. Others struggled, failed the test of time, and ultimately ceased to exist in a short while. 

Let’s take a look at the current trends as far as JS frameworks are concerned. 

builtwith.com and w3techs.com

According to data on w3techs.com over the past six years, jQuery and Bootstrap JS are still far ahead of the pack with the shares of 77.6% and 21.5% correspondingly.

This report shows the historical trends in the usage of the top JavaScript libraries since January 2012. 

	2017	2018	2019	2020	2021	2022
jQuery	73.1%	73.6%	74.2%	77.2%	78.5%	77.6%
Bootstrap JS	16.5%	18.3%	20.1%	21.6%	22.6%	21.5%
Underscore	1.9%	2.8%	3.2%	4.4%	7.9%	8.8%
Lodash	0.5%	0.2%	0.2%	1.5%	3.1%	3.3%
React	0.5%	0.2%	0.3%	0.3%	2.5%	3.2%
GSAP	0.3%	0.4%	0.5%	0.7%	1.7%	1.6%
Angular	0.5%	0.4%	0.4%	0.4%	0.4%	1.2%

builtwith.com gives us a somewhat different picture, with jQuery and React confidently leading the way. 

Note: The year columns contain the number of live websites (in top 1 million websites according to the builtwith.com stats) built with a particular technology. 

	2018	2019	2020	2021	2022
jQuery	550K	580K	600K	650K	650K
React	12K	15K	65K	112K	110K
Lodash	25K	30K	75K	112K	95K
Underscore	45K	55K	87K	100K	100K
GSAP	65K	65K	60K	65K	60K
Angular	40K	40K	44K	58K	60K
Vue	7K	10K	40K	50K	58K
Bootstrap JS	90K	100K	110K	55K	50K
Backbone js	15K	17K	17K	27K	25K
Mootools	18K	16K	15K	15K	11K
Gatsbyjs	–	2K	3.5K	4.5K	5k

What conclusions can we make as far as the popularity of JavaScript frameworks is concerned? 

• jQuery remains  the most popular framework. However, the share of active sites that use this technology has stopped growing and even slightly decreased throughout 2022. While 78.3% of websites used it early in the year, this percentage fell to 77.6% by the end of 2022.
• According to builtwith.com and w3techs.com, React, Angular JS, Vue JS, Underscore, Lodash, GSAP, and Gatsbyjs all show a positive trend, with an ever increasing number of websites using them. 
• Based on the data on both builtwith.com and w3techs.com, React’s share is rapidly growing. According to builtwith.com, the number of websites built with React doubled in 2021. However, this growth somewhat slowed down in 2022. w3techs.com, in its turn, reports that the growth continued in 2022. While React’s share was just 0.3% in 2020, it grew to 3.2% in 2022. 

stackoverflow.co

StackOverFlow is one of the largest web development communities on the Internet. Every year, they conduct a survey among the members about their preferred development tools, including programming languages, frameworks, and so on. 

Unlike builtwith.com and w3techs.com, which provide present-day data, StackOverFlow survey results give us a glimpse into the future. They allow us to find out not only about the tools favored by developers at the moment but also those they would like to use in projects to come. 

That was the primary reason why we decided to review the stackoverflow.co survey data as well. We discovered it to confirm the rising popularity of React and declining popularity of jQuery, as this table illustrates: 

	2020	2021	2022
jQuery	43%	34%	29%
React JS	36%	40%	42%
Angular JS	16%	11%	9%
Vue JS	17%	19%	18%

Another interesting trend is the growing share of Node JS among developers reported by stackoverflow.co last year. Almost half of the survey respondents (47%) marked it as the main framework in 2022.

Keyword Statistics 

One of the ways to determine the most popular web development trends is to gather search term statistics. Google Trends, probably the best tool for this purpose, provides no specific numbers but allows us to see the progress of a certain technology over time.  

That’s why our next step was to look at search queries for the technologies we were interested in using the popular ahrefs.com service. 

We focused on these two groups of queries: 

• Commercial. Those are used when the searcher needs to collect more information about a particular service or brand. Example: “React development services.” 
• Informational.  Users enter those when looking for answers to specific questions or some general information. For example, they might enter “React development” when they want to find out about the advantages of using React in their projects. 

Here is what we discovered. 

Informational Keyword Frequency Statistics

Commercial keywords frequency statistics

JavaScript Frameworks Trends: Main Conclusions 

• jQuery shows a flat trend. The number of active websites that use this technology is not growing, while the number of commercial queries is insignificant compared to the top 3. In addition, according to stackoverflow.co, jQuery is rapidly losing popularity among developers. Just a few of the web development companies that we reviewed mention jQuery on their websites.
• The top three frameworks – React, Angular, and Vue – are showing a steady growth in the number of websites that use them, as well as a positive trend on Google Trends. Commercial queries from this group also illustrate a high frequency.
• Most of the web development companies that we have reviewed are betting on React, Angular, and Vue too.
• Underscore, Lodash, GSAP, and Gatsby JS show a positive trend in terms of the number of websites that use them, but the number of commercial queries for them is still very small. This is confirmed by the fact that those frameworks are rarely mentioned on the websites that we reviewed (GSAP and Gatsby JS are only mentioned once), as well as on Google Trends.
• The number of search queries for Node JS is growing. This framework is mentioned by almost half of the reviewed web development companies. It also ranked first in the 2022 StackOverflow survey. 

CMSs and Low-Code/No-Code Solutions 

Many content management systems like WordPress have been around for quite some time and have not lost their popularity among businesses since their inception. At the same time, a number of new, sophisticated no-code platforms have entered the market in recent years.

In a nutshell, no-code solutions allow both professional developers and ordinary users without a tech background to build software using a graphical interface rather than by writing code as it has always been the case. 

What are the current CMS and no-code/low-code development trends? Let’s take a look. 

builtwith.com and w3techs.com

Here is how w3techs.com has been ranking content management systems by popularity over the past six years, with WordPress outperforming all of its competitors by a wide margin. 

	2018	2019	2020	2021	2022	2023
WordPress	29.2%	32.7%	35.4%	39.5%	43.2%	43.1%
Wix	0.4%	1.0%	1.3%	1.5%	1.9%	2.4%
Squarespace	0.7%	1.4%	1.5%	1.4%	1.8%	2.0%
Joomla	3.2%	3.0%	2.6%	2.2%	1.7%	1.8%
Drupal	2.3%	1.9%	1.7%	1.5%	1.3%	1.2%
Webflow	0.1%	0.1%	0.2%	0.4%	0.6%	0.6%

The stats from builtwith.com confirm the global popularity of WordPress over the last 5 years. 

Note: The year columns contain the number of live websites (in top 1 million websites according to the builtwith stats) built with a particular technology.

	2018	2019	2020	2021	2022
WordPress	200K	230K	250K	260K	270K
Drupal	30K	28K	29K	32K	26K
Hubspot CMS	>1K	>1K	>1K	13.7K	16K
Joomla	15K	15K	15K	15K	13K
Unbounce CMS	1.5K	5K	8.7K	10.2K	11.2K
Webflow	1.8K	2.2K	4.5K	6.5K	7.5K
Wix	3.2K	4K	5.5K	8K	9K
Squarespace	4.5K	5K	5.5K	6K	4K
Progress Sitefinity	2K	2K	2.3K	2K	2K

Unsurprisingly, search volume statistics and our research into web development companies also show that WordPress tops the charts both in the USA and globally. 

Commercial queries search statistics for CMSs

Commercial queries search statistics for CMSs (USA)

Drupal remains the second most popular CMS. Other platforms, such as Joomla, Hubspot, Contentful, Craft CMS, and Squarespace, are searched for far less frequently. 

Let’s sum up what we have discovered. 

CMSs

• WordPress remains the leader in terms of usage.  Its market share is currently 30% according to builtwith.com and 43% according to w3Techs.com, steadily growing year-to-year. The frequency of commercial queries for WordPress (1,750 per month for US) also significantly exceeds the frequency of competing solutions.
• Drupal and Joomla are still close to the top. However, the number of websites based on these CMSs is declining year-to-year. According to w3Techs.com, Drupal’s share dropped from 2.3% in 2018 to 1.2% at the start of 2023, while Joomla’s share fell from 3.2% in 2018 to 1.8% early this year.

Low-Code/No-Code Solutions 

There is an abundance of low-code/no-code solutions.  As the Low-Code Development Platform Global Market Report 2022 (a general study of low-code solutions, not just those related to web development) by researchandmarkets.com concludes, the popularity of low-code solutions will continue to grow. While the market for low-code solutions was $25 billion in 2022, it is expected to grow to $68 billion by 2026.

However, the search volume for most is extremely low or non-existent. People do not search Google for services to create websites using those tools. 

The frequency of informational search queries for ‘Low-code/No-code development’ is 1,000 in the US region and 5,000 globally. At the same time, the frequency of commercial queries in the US region is 30, while being 10,000 globally.

The reviewed web development companies don’t focus on those solutions either. For example, they are not included in the list of services on the home page. 

Other findings: 

• Almost all low-code platforms show growth in the number of websites that use them. The exception is Squarespace, but only according to builtwith.com. According to w3Techs.com, Squarespace has shown a slight growth over the past 6 years. builtwith.com, for its part, maintains that this growth stopped in 2022. Squarespace has the largest number of  commercial queries among all no-code solutions – 460.

• As both builtwith.com and w3techs.com report, Webflow is actively growing. However, it still can’t exceed other solutions in popularity, only competing with Squarespace according to builtwith.com. Webflow’s frequency of commercial queries is the lowest among all other solutions – 70 per month. However, according to codemap.io, it is the most popular solution in the website builders category – 85% of all requests.
• While builtwith.com puts Hubspot CMS and Unbounce CMS among the leaders, w3techs.com doesn’t mention them at all. Over the past two years, the number of users of these CMSs has increased significantly. At the same time, there are no commercial queries for Unbounce CMS, while the frequency of those queries for Hubspot is 100.
• w3techs.com reports Wix as the second most popular solution (2.4%) after WordPress. According to builtwith.com, however, it lags far behind Hubspot CMS and Unbounce CMS. A possible reason is that Wix is more often used to create new websites that are not in the top 1 million statistics that builtwith.com focuses on. Hubspot CMS and Unbounce CMS, on the other hand, are more commonly used to build well-established websites. The volume of commercial queries for Wix is 100.

E-Commerce CMSs 

E-commerce CMSs allow online merchants to manage their stores from one centralized location, effortlessly performing all essential business operations such as product sourcing, marketing, analytics, and a lot of others.

New e-commerce platforms that have entered the market in recent years are more robust, secure, and convenient than their predecessors. Which of those are currently more popular and promising than their competitors? Here is the data. 

builtwith.com and w3techs.com

According to w3techs.com, the list of the most popular e-commerce platforms over the past six years looks like this: 

	2018	2019	2020	2021	2022
Shopify	0.9%	1.4%	1.9%	3.2%	4.4%
PrestaShop	0.6%	0.8%	0.7%	0.5%	0.5%
OpenCart	0.4%	0.5%	0.6%	0.6%	0.5%

Note: w3techs.com provides no statistics for e-commerce CMSs separately, putting all CMSs (WordPress, Drupal, etc.) and E-Commerce CMSs (Shopify, OpenCart, etc.) into one group. We have only focused on the latter. 

builtwith.com has been ranking e-commerce platforms over the past five years this way: 

Note: The year columns contain the number of live websites (in top 1 million websites according to the builtwith stats) built with a particular technology. The World and USA columns represent the percentage of sites built on a particular CMS in the world and in the USA, respectively. 

	World	USA	2018	2019	2020	2021	2022
WooCommerce	2.7%	16%	8K	12.5K	18.5K	23K	23K
Shopify	2.6%	26%	10.5K	13K	16.5K	21.5K	25.5K
Magneto	0.9%	0.5%	9K	9K	9K	8.5K	7.8K
Wix Stores	0.7%	25%	1K	2.5K	3K	4K	4K
Squarespace	0.3%	14%	1.5K	1.5K	1.5K	2K	2.5K
Opencart	0.2%	1%	1.7K	2K	2.2K	2.5K	2.2K
Prestashop	0.2%	0.6%	1.5K	1.7K	1.7K	2.2K	2K
BigCommerce	0.2%	0.3%	1.2K	1.3K	1.5K	1.6K	1.7K
Ecwid	0.1%	3.5%	1K<	1K<	1K	1.1K	1.2K

According to Google Trends, Shopify is an undisputed leader among all e-commerce CMSs. Regarding search queries for specific e-commerce platforms, the results look as follows: 

Commercial queries search statistics for E-Commerce CMSs

Commercial queries search statistics for E-Commerce CMSs (USA)

So what do we have? 

• According to builtwith.com and w3techs.com, Shopify is currently the most popular solution with a clear uptrend. The data on builtwith.com shows that Shopify overtook WooCommerce in popularity in 2022. Besides, Shopify has the biggest search volume among all competitive solutions, as confirmed by Google Trends. 
• builtwith.com reports that the number of WooCommerce websites in 2022 was almost level with 2021. However, as far as search volume is concerned, WooCommerce is significantly less popular – 340 versus 1,100 for Shopify.
• Magento remains one of the most popular e-commerce solutions and is mentioned most frequently by the reviewed web development services. However, the trend (according to builtwith.com) is negative. Until 2020, the number of new Magento-based websites did not grow, while starting from 2021, it began to decline. At the same time, the frequency of search queries for Magento is still quite high – 1,100.
• Wix Stores and Squarespace Ecommerce have been modestly but steadily growing over the past few years. However, these solutions have no search volume whatsoever. 
• The number of websites based on PrestaShop, OpenCart, and BigCommerce has remained stable over the past few years –  2,000 according to builtwith.com. The frequency of requests per month for BigCommerce is 250, Opencart – 100, and PrestaShop – 50.

Wrapping It Up 

Based on the collected data, there is an overriding takeaway that we want to highlight: the web development industry is moving in two opposite directions. 

1. Building simple websites and landing pages using low-code/no-code development platforms with a sophisticated graphical UI such as Webflow.
2. Making complex, highly interactive, mobile-first web applications using advanced JavaScript frameworks and libraries like React, Vue, and Angular: SPAs, PWAs, and other types of apps. 

Which direction you choose depends on your specific business needs and financial situation. For example, if your goal is to roll out an MVP to validate your product hypothesis as fast as possible, then low-code/no-code development is definitely the way to go. 

On the other hand, if you have long-term objectives, wanting to ensure the maximum coverage of your target audience and provide the best user experience, consider a more complex approach to web development with state-of-the-art JavaScript frameworks. 

Looking for advice on which path is optimal for your business or need help building a website or web app? We will be happy to assist. Our team of experienced web developers offers comprehensive expertise on using low-code/no-code solutions and leveraging the great power of JS frameworks, e-commerce platforms, content management systems, and more. 

Let’s get in touch!