Technology scores of websites

Posted by Sam Soltano on 16 December 2010 in News

The technology score rates a site based on its technologies in a range from 0 to 100.

It has three components:

• The popularity score shows how many sites use the same technologies. This is based on the technology usage amongst the top 1 million sites.
• The traffic score shows how much traffic other sites typically have when they use the same technologies. This is based on the top-site ranking of the technologies.
• The version score shows how many sites use more recent technology versions.

Quality alerts also affect the rating by lowering the score by 5 points for each alert.

We can take a look at our own (W3Techs.com) technology score as an example:

The overall score is 70, popularity is higher, except for the markup language (we use HTML Strict, which is rarely used). Our traffic score is above average with the highest value for the advertising networks, and our version score is good, primarily because we run the latest Apache version.

Now, what does that mean?

We would advise not to overemphasize the overall score. We are not suggesting that sites with a high overall technology score are "better" in any meaningful sense. Google, for instance, has a score of 51. We are not saying that our own site is technically superior to Google.

We suggest to concentrate on the sub-scores instead. It might be helpful to know whether your site is primarily made with run-of-the-mill technologies, or with more exotic technologies, and in which areas you use them. Similarly, if you have a low-traffic site, and you use technologies that are typically used by high-traffic sites, you might possibly want to reconsider your decisions if you think your choices are an overkill. Also, there is nothing wrong with using old versions of tools as long as they provide what you need, but knowing that most sites have moved to newer versions could be an input for an upgrade strategy.

In that sense, we don't want this new score to be taken too serious, but it might be fun to compare the ratings of your favorite sites.

Share this page