HTTP Archive’s 2025 Web Almanac: The State of the Web, Measured
The HTTP Archive has released its latest Web Almanac, and as always, it’s a dense, data-rich look at the current state of the web, drawing from a massive sample of 17.2 million live websites. The full report spans 15 chapters covering everything from content and performance to accessibility and UX. While digesting all of it takes time, a few headline numbers stand out immediately for anyone building for the web.
Here are some of the most striking findings from this year’s edition.
Accessibility: A Mixed Bag of Progress and Persistent Problems
Color contrast remains a sore spot. Only 30% of sites now meet WCAG contrast guidelines—up from 21% in 2020, but still a low bar for compliance. Focus visibility is another major issue: a full 67% of sites remove focus outlines, directly contradicting the WCAG requirement that keyboard-operable interfaces have a visible focus indicator.
Image descriptions are also lacking. About 30% of sites use an empty alt attribute, signaling that the images are decorative. However, another 14% of sites omit the attribute entirely, meaning nearly half of all sites fail to properly describe their visual content for screen readers. ARIA labels are pervasive—used on 70% of sites, including 29% on buttons—which can be a positive sign, but also a red flag if not implemented with proper semantic context.
CSS and Fonts: New Features and Variable Adoption
New CSS features are slowly making their way into production. The balance value for text-wrap is used on 2.67% of sites, and the pretty value on 1.71%. These are early adoption numbers for features that only shipped a couple of years ago, so their presence is notable.
Variable fonts have clearly moved past the novelty phase. This year, 39.4% of desktop sites and 41.3% of mobile sites use at least one variable font, meaning about 4 in 10 sites have embraced the technology.
Platform and Performance: Stability and Weight
The content management system landscape shows little change. WordPress continues to dominate, with its market share wavering by only a couple of percentage points year over year. The report’s analysis suggests WordPress is shifting from expansion to stabilization, which is arguably a healthy sign for the ecosystem at large.
Page weight remains a growing concern. The median mobile home page clocked in at 845 KB in July 2015. By July 2025, that figure has ballooned to 2,362 KB—a 202.8% increase over the decade. While images remain the heaviest resource, JavaScript now contributes a substantial 697 KB to the average page, adding weight that further supports the argument that the last ten years were a lost decade for web performance that we must now reckon with.
