Analysis of the top 1M pages on the web finds that HTTP/2 is now more common than HTTP/1.1; jQuery, Google Analytics were the top JavaScript libraries by usage
We rendered the top 1 million pages on the web, tracking every conceivable performance metric, logging every error, noting every requested URL.
Context & Ripple Effects
HTTP/2’s move from a finalized standard to majority use across this sample marks a measurable deployment milestone. It follows an era in which pages were getting heavier while request counts stayed high, as captured in an earlier web-page weight and request-count survey.
The same measurement shows that the client-side stack has not modernized uniformly: jQuery and Google Analytics remain widely embedded. That persistence matters against prior evidence that many sites carried JavaScript libraries with known vulnerabilities.
First-order effects
- Web operators still serving HTTP/1.1 are now operating outside the protocol majority identified by the top-1M-page sample, making their delivery stack an explicit modernization target.
- jQuery and Google Analytics retain unusually broad installed bases, keeping both products central dependencies for site owners and web-development teams.
Second-order effects
- Performance tooling and hosting providers can treat HTTP/2 as the prevailing baseline in this population rather than an emerging deployment option.
- The continued reach of jQuery raises the value of dependency inventory and patching work for site owners, given the earlier survey’s finding that vulnerable JavaScript libraries were widespread.
Third-order effects
- The web stack is separating into layers with different replacement cycles: transport protocols can cross a deployment threshold while client-side libraries and analytics integrations remain entrenched.
- If this pattern persists, web modernization will be governed less by a single platform transition than by operators’ ability to update long-lived third-party dependencies alongside infrastructure.
The trend: Web infrastructure is advancing toward newer delivery standards while pervasive JavaScript and analytics dependencies remain slower-moving parts of the stack.