HTTP Archive has released a 2022 State of the Web report, Web Almanac, which combines HTTP Archive’s raw statistics and trends with the expertise of the web community; 22 chapters covering page content, user experience, publishing and distribution of all aspects.

HTTP Archive is a community-run project that has been studying how the web is built since 2010; using WebPageTest and Lighthouse, the metadata of approximately 8.4 million websites is tested monthly and incorporated into a public BigQuery database for analysis . These are the sites analyzed in Google’s Chrome User Experience Report, which is based on only the most active sites, which are also publicly accessible and popular enough. The 2022 Web Almanac Web Yearbook is based on the June 2022 dataset.

One of the conclusions is that “WebAssembly is not widely used, we are not seeing a growth in usage, but a modest contraction”. The report states that the amount of wasm (compiled WebAssembly code) in web pages is low. The researchers found 3,204 confirmed WebAssembly requests on desktop and 2,777 on mobile. These modules are used in 2,524 domains on desktop and 2,216 domains on mobile, corresponding to 0.06% and 0.04% of all their domains, respectively.

By far the largest area of ​​WebAssembly adoption is Amazon IVS (Amazon Interactive Video Service), which is used for video codecs, allowing consistent video decoding independent of the user’s browser’s codec support. Second is an npm module, Hyphenopoly, which provides a polyfill for CSS hyphenation; the core algorithm is provided as a WebAssembly module, so it has a small footprint and stable performance. Microsoft Blazor came in third.

The researchers believe that WebAssembly is a niche web technology for the web, and likely always will be. While WebAssembly brings a wide range of languages ​​to the web such as C++, Rust, Go, AssemblyScript, C#, etc., these languages ​​are not yet a replacement for JavaScript. For the vast majority of websites, whose content is relatively static and moderately interactive, “there is simply no compelling reason to use WebAssembly at the moment.” But WebAssembly is already adding value to the web, and there are many web applications that benefit greatly from the technology.

Additionally, the report shows that CMS adoption is stable at 45-47% of desktop and mobile sites. The popularity of different systems has changed little but significant, with WordPress continuing to grow. “Drupal and Joomla continued to lose market share on a year-over-year basis, while Squarespace held steady and Wix grew. WordPress continued to rise, with mobile up 1.4% over 2021 and desktop up 0.2% over 2021.”

But WordPress is one of the worst performing CMS systems on average, although it depends on how it’s implemented and the plugins used. WordPress expert Jonathan Wold reports in his analysis that only 30% of WordPress sites achieve a “passing score” on Google’s Core Web Vitals score. Specifically, a pass grade refers to a level of LCP (Largest Contentful Paint) of 2.5 seconds or less, FID (First Input Delay) of 100ms or less, and CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift) of 0.1 or less.

And some bad habits and old technologies are hurting web performance: such as using old and inefficient image formats, of which WebP or better AVIF is the most efficient, but PNG, JPG and GIF are still more popular; or relying on Too many third-party scripts can slow down pages; or use the deprecated document.write API to handle dynamic content, or prevent pages with embedded YouTube videos from loading.

See the full report for more details.