Data Studies
Research on the platform and domain changes behind a site move, and what they do to traffic. Studies track which website platforms are gaining and losing sites, how many sites still run software that no longer gets support, how rankings change after a platform switch, and how often old links point at redirects or dead pages. The data comes from the public HTTP Archive crawl and its monthly records of the software sites run, Google's Chrome UX Report, backlink index data and Google US ranking history. Use them to plan a migration that keeps the rankings you have.
19 studies · Need help acting on them? See our website migration services.
97.6% of established business websites have links from other websites pointing at pages that now return an error, and on a quarter of them more than 22.6% of all incoming links lead to a dead page. 39.4% of small business websites have the same problem.
37.1% of small business websites that run on secure HTTPS still link to at least one old, insecure http:// address, and 23.5% of their pages carry such a link. Church websites have the highest rate at 63%.
382,097 websites, 2.5% of all homepages, still load Universal Analytics, the old version of Google Analytics that stopped recording data in July 2023. Among the 500,000 most visited homepages, 6.6% carry the old tag with no sign of its replacement.
659,120 homepages served over secure HTTPS, 4.5% of them, still pull in at least one image, script or other file over insecure HTTP. Websites outside the 10 million most visited do it at more than twice the rate of the 10,000 most visited.
41% of the top websites that switched platforms between September 2025 and March 2026 moved to Shopify, a net gain of 717 websites. No other platform gained more than 41. Self-managed systems such as WooCommerce, WordPress and Magento saw more websites leave than arrive.
Magento lost 23.8% of its stores between October 2024 and September 2026, falling from 58,906 homepages to 44,868. Over the same two years Shopify grew 22.7%, and of the top Magento stores that switched platforms, most went to Shopify.
0.10% of online stores, about one in a thousand, run a recognizable headless storefront, and the total grew 2.1% in a year. Nearly all the growth belongs to Shopify's own framework, Hydrogen, which grew 69.6% and now runs half of all headless stores.
24,332 websites still run Drupal 7, more than 20 months after it stopped receiving security fixes on January 5, 2025. That is 21% of Drupal websites with a detectable version, and 1,005 of them rank among the 1 million most visited websites.
1,669 online stores still run Magento 1, more than six years after Adobe stopped releasing security patches for it on June 30, 2020. Among Magento stores outside the 10 million most visited websites, 14.8% are still on the old version.
64.3% of websites that moved to a new website platform ranked for fewer keywords on Google's first page afterwards, and 60.5% had less Google organic traffic within months of the switch. The median website ranked for 16.1% fewer first-page keywords and had 14.4% fewer visits from Google search.
9.5% of small business websites still load their insecure http:// version without sending visitors to the secure https:// one, and real estate websites do it at more than twice that rate, 20.8%. Another 3.8% show a security certificate that browsers reject.
36.6% of links from other websites to small business websites now reach their page only through a redirect, most often left behind by a www or HTTPS change. For 37.7% of small businesses, redirects carry half or more of all their backlinks.
WordPress runs 31.97% of website homepages, nearly one in three, against 34.85% a year earlier. It still runs more than twenty times as many homepages as Squarespace, the next website builder on the list.
Shopify ran on 13.1% more website homepages in September 2026 than a year earlier, reaching a record 729,553, while the total number of homepages HTTP Archive tracks fell 2.6%. Shopify also won 41% of all platform switches among the 1 million most visited websites.
WooCommerce ran on 121,411 fewer website homepages in September 2026 than a year earlier, an 11% drop and more than the 110,959 websites on Webflow in total. It dropped below 1 million homepages in August 2026, but still runs more websites than Shopify's 729,553.
HTTP Archive found Drupal on 23.8% fewer website homepages in September 2026 than in October 2024, 141,306 against 185,552, and 13.4% fewer than a year earlier. 24,332 Drupal homepages still run Drupal 7, which stopped receiving support in January 2025.
HTTP Archive found Joomla on 36.3% fewer website homepages in September 2026 than in October 2024, 151,524 against 238,001, the steepest two-year fall of any website platform tracked. In the last year alone the count fell 24%.
Webflow ran on 4.7% more website homepages in September 2026 than in October 2024, the only one of five hosted website platforms tracked that grew, while Wix fell 9.8%, Squarespace 4.9%, HubSpot CMS 5.3% and BigCommerce 15.2%. Wix is still the largest by far, with more websites than the other four combined.
32% of Magento business websites have a redirect problem or a broken link in their first 3 pages, nearly six times the 5.4% rate on Wix and twice the 16% rate for business websites overall. WordPress (18.8%) and Shopify (18.2%) sit in the middle of 13 website platforms compared.
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