The top 10 landing page frameworks used by startups

Via my side project WhatTheStack, I scanned thousands of landing pages of YC startups to figure out what they use to build them.

Many startups were offline, many domains for sale. Failure is common, even for top startups.

But many had great active landing pages. Here are the top landing page frameworks used, based on the analysis.

 1. Webflow ...... 35.9% ▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒
 2. WordPress .... 21.5% ▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒
 3. Next.js ...... 17.2% ▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒
 4. Gatsby ........ 4.6% ▒▒▒
 5. Wix ........... 4.3% ▒▒▒
 6. Squarespace ... 4.3% ▒▒▒
 7. React ......... 4.1% ▒▒▒
 8. Nuxt.js ....... 2.8% ▒▒
 9. Shopify ....... 2.8% ▒▒
10. Angular ....... 1.4% ▒

Some insights:

#1: Webflow dominates

A YC company itself, it eclipsed Wordpress.

Now that I read the stats, this feels correct, but it's still surprising to see how it gained dominance so quickly.

#2: Next.js rules the SPA frameworks.

For those who don't want to use a nocode/lowcode tool for their landing page, Next.js is the top choice.

Next.js is React, but it has additional features. For example, it makes it very easy to render pages at compile-time. It's important that landing pages load fast, so it makes a lot of sense to pre-compile pages. Next.js is also very easy to deploy via Vercel, the company that created Next.js.

#3: Shopify is on the list

Even though it's not a pure landing page builder at its core, but it seems easy enough to just point a domain at Shopify for many.

Some (interesting) caveats

1. The analysis cannot diagnose server-side frameworks (yet).
2. And a lot of pages have no framework at all. It's quite popular to just pre-fill a template and upload it to S3.
3. React might score higher in an improved analysis -- it's difficult to diagnose some React pages.
4. Overall, the discovery of pages was 2/3. The rest was failed startups, no framework, server-side frameworks, etc.