jQuery Is Still Spreading: 38 New Adoptions This Week
Is jQuery still being adopted in 2026?
Yes. In our scan window for the week of 2026-05-20 to 2026-05-26, 38 sites newly adopted jQuery while 30 removed it — a net +8. The common Twitter take that "jQuery is dead" is contradicted by what's actually happening on the open web: WordPress sites still pull it in by default, government domains keep it on legacy templates, and many SaaS apps lean on its DOM-manipulation idioms long after they've added React or Vue elsewhere.
What does it mean when a site adopts HSTS?
HSTS (HTTP Strict Transport Security) is a security header that tells browsers to never connect to a site over plain HTTP again — even if a user types http:// in the address bar. 27 sites adopted HSTS this week with zero removals, the cleanest one-directional signal in this issue. Either browsers' Quality-of-Protection pressure is paying off, or a cohort of WordPress hosting providers flipped the default on.
Why did HTTP/3 have both 27 adoptions and 20 removals?
HTTP/3 detection is sensitive to CDN edge routing. When Cloudflare or another CDN toggles HTTP/3 on a customer's domain — or migrates that domain between edge POPs — the detection flips on the next scan. 27 sites newly served HTTP/3 this week and 20 stopped, giving a net of +7. The volatility reflects CDN behavior, not application choices.
How does DetectZeStack detect these tech changes?
DetectZeStack runs a continuous scanner against a tracked corpus of websites. Each scan generates a tech-stack snapshot. The system compares the new snapshot to the previous one and emits structured tech-change records — added, removed, or version_changed. Detection uses 4 layers: Wappalyzer fingerprints, DNS CNAME analysis, TLS certificate issuer inspection, and custom HTTP-header pattern matching. The live data feeds /weekly/tech-changes (dashboard), /weekly/feed.xml (RSS), and these editorial issues.
This week at a glance
Top 10 technologies adopted
| Technology | Category | Sites adopting |
|---|---|---|
| jQuery | JavaScript libraries | 38 |
| PHP | Programming languages | 36 |
| Google Tag Manager | Tag managers | 31 |
| WordPress | CMS | 29 |
| MySQL | Databases | 29 |
| jQuery Migrate | JavaScript libraries | 27 |
| HTTP/3 | Misc. | 27 |
| HSTS | Security | 27 |
| Google Analytics | Analytics | 26 |
| Bootstrap | UI frameworks | 18 |
Top 10 technologies dropped
| Technology | Category | Sites dropping |
|---|---|---|
| jQuery | JavaScript libraries | 30 |
| PHP | Programming languages | 25 |
| Google Analytics | Analytics | 24 |
| WordPress | CMS | 23 |
| MySQL | Databases | 23 |
| Nginx | Web servers | 22 |
| jQuery Migrate | JavaScript libraries | 20 |
| HTTP/3 | Misc. | 20 |
| C3.js | JavaScript libraries | 20 |
| Let's Encrypt | SSL/TLS CA | 19 |
Notable individual migrations this week
A few changes stood out at the per-domain level:
- www.gov.br (Brazil federal government portal) — added Amazon S3, Amazon Web Services, dropped C3.js, and upgraded Bootstrap across two scans this week. A government domain mid-cloud-migration is rare to catch in real-time.
- www.fivetran.com — added Optimizely, removed Webflow. Webflow → Optimizely on a SaaS marketing site usually signals a shift from "marketing-team-controlled landing pages" to "growth-team-controlled experimentation."
- baremetalstandard.com — added a full WordPress stack in one scan window (Apache, MySQL, PHP, WordPress, Elementor, Yoast SEO, WP Rocket). Either a brand-new site or a relaunch.
- ethiotravelandtours.com — three concurrent WordPress component upgrades (Contact Form 7, Elementor, WordPress core). The right kind of routine update cluster.
Each detected change corresponds to a programmatic page on DetectZeStack. Click any technology in the tables above to see every site that adopted or dropped it. Browse the live dashboard for the full feed (updates daily).
Caveats on the data
This is a first-party scan corpus, not a complete census of the web. We track a defined set of sites; the counts here represent change activity within that corpus, not global adoption rates. The signal direction is reliable (a tech going from "not detected" to "detected" on 38 distinct sites is a real signal). The absolute magnitude is corpus-bounded. Expect issue-to-issue volatility — single weeks can be noisy; trends become clear over months.
Detection methodology and false-positive rates are documented in the how-detection-works post (coming soon) and the OpenAPI spec.
What's next
Issue #2 ships 2026-06-05 with a fresh week of data. The format will be the same: one surprising headline finding, full top-10 tables, a few named domain-level migrations, and caveats. If you want the raw data, the RSS feed emits every detected change as it lands. If you want to detect tech changes on your own domain or competitors', the REST API lets you query the same data programmatically.