A data report · Six years of the web

English still writes the web. But its grip is loosening. Spanish, German and Japanese are climbing fast. Mandarin and Arabic, spoken by more than two billion people between them, remain conspicuously absent from the world's websites.

49.3%
English share of the web, 2025
▼ 7.5 pts since 2020
6.0%
Spanish share of the web, 2025
▲ 1.4 pts since 2020
1.2%
Chinese share of the web, 2025
▼ 0.2 pts since 2020
0.5%
Arabic share of the web, 2025
▼ 0.3 pts since 2020

Chapter I · Time series

Six years on the line.

Annual share of websites, by content language, from 2020 to 2025. Toggle a language to add or remove it from the chart.

Source: W3Techs — Historical yearly trends in content languages (w3techs.com). January snapshots, share of websites whose content language is known.

Chapter II · The Top 25

Where every language stands.

The 25 most-published content languages on the web, ranked by their 2025 share. Click a column to sort; type to filter.

# Language 2020 2021 2022 2023 2024 2025 Δ 2020→25 Trend

Sparklines show each language's 2020–2025 trajectory at a common vertical scale (0%–65%). Source: W3Techs.

Chapter III · The mismatch

The web is not the world.

For every language, we compare its share of the web (W3Techs, 2025) with its share of the world's speakers (Ethnologue, L1 + L2). Bars to the right of zero indicate languages overrepresented online; bars to the left, underrepresented.

Speaker share = (L1 + L2 speakers, Ethnologue 2024) ÷ 8.0 billion world population. Arabic and Mandarin are highlighted; both are vastly underrepresented online relative to the number of people who speak them.

Chapter IV · Side by side

Web share vs. speaker share.

A direct comparison. The gap column is web % minus speaker %. Negative values mark languages whose web presence trails their speaker base.

Language Speakers (M, L1+L2) Speaker share of world Web share, 2025 Gap (web − speaker) Status

In summary

Five things to take from the data.

  1. English is shrinking. From 56.8% of websites in 2020 to 49.3% in 2025 — its first sustained decline on record.
  2. The "long tail" is fattening. Spanish, German, Japanese, French, Portuguese and Italian all gained share between 2020 and 2025.
  3. Russian is in retreat online. Down from 7.6% to 3.9%, the steepest fall after English.
  4. Mandarin is the great absence. Spoken by 14.3% of humanity, it powers just 1.2% of websites — a gap of roughly 13 points.
  5. Arabic, Hindi, Bengali, Urdu together account for more than 20% of speakers worldwide and less than 1% of websites.