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Jeff Chandler

GravityForms Detected On 53% Of The Top 1 Million Sites Ranked By Alexa Using Hosted Forms

Datanyze, a company specializing in determining what web technologies are being used based on their code signature, has new data indicating GravityForms has the most market share. Out of the top one million websites ranked by Alexa that use hosted forms, GravityForms was detected on 53.3% of them. That’s more than all of the other form plugins and services in the chart combined.

GravityForms Leading The Way With 53.3%
GravityForms Leading The Way With 53.3%

I’m surprised Ninja Forms or Contact Form 7 is not on the pie chart. I thought Contact Form 7 would be their biggest competitor but it turns out it’s Wufoo and other form generating services. I contacted Datanyze to figure out if those systems are tracked or not.

Jon Hearty of Datanyze said, “The reason they aren’t there is because we do not currently track them. We add technologies everyday, usually based on requests from our customers and prospects.”

Datanyze explains on their frequently asked questions page how they obtain the data and determine code signatures.

Most web technologies have certain footprints or “signatures” when used by one of the websites. For example, if you view the HTML code for any WordPress site, you will find something like this: <meta name=”generator” content=”WordPress …” />. By finding and cataloging these signatures, Datanyze can determine not only which technologies a website is using, but also when they added or dropped them.

With the top one million websites ranked by Alexa changing each month, the data represented in the pie chart is only a snapshot of time. But what the data shows is that GravityForms is doing exceptionally well, especially against the other form solutions being monitored.

I’d love to see more WordPress specific contact form solutions added to the chart such as Contact Form 7 and Ninja forms just to get a more complete picture.

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16 responses to “GravityForms Detected On 53% Of The Top 1 Million Sites Ranked By Alexa Using Hosted Forms”

  1. Hi Jeff
    “Jon Hearty of Datanyze said, “The reason they aren’t there is because we do not currently track them.”

    A bit misleading then and I notice that you had to ask to get the information.

    I use CF7 on all my sites and I’ve never worked out why the average WordPress site user needs Gravity Forms.

    You can do a lot with CF7 with a little CSS.

    That reminds me I must donate to CF7 the developers deserve it.

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    • Contact Form 7 was the first contact form plugin I used when I first got involved with WordPress. It worked well and I never had a problem with it. If all you need is a simple contact form, CF 7 fits the bill. For the longest time, this post from 2009 on how to configure it was the best performing post on the site https://wptavern.com/configuring-contact-form-7 it still gets traffic. I also received so many support emails, I had to update the post and close comments explaining I’m not the plugin author and don’t do support.

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  2. Sooo… I’m kind of confused by the data and I’m sure it’s just me. But wouldn’t that mean that WordPress would have to be running on more than 53% of the top 1,000,000 sites ranked by Alexa? That seems…. like a lot.

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  3. Hi everyone,

    Jon from Datanyze here. Thanks, Jeff, for sharing this. I’ve requested that we add both Contact Form 7 and Ninja Forms, so they should be up in a few days. If anyone would like me to request to add any other technologies, don’t hesitate to ask! Also, to be clear, this is not saying that 53.3% of the Alexa top 1 million is using GravityForms, but that 53.3% of all websites in the Alexa top 1 million that are using hosted forms, 53.3% are using Gravity forms.

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  4. Among sites using WordPress, Contact Form 7 is the second most popular plugin, right in between the two main SEO plugins: WordPress SEO by Yoast (#1) and All in One SEO Pack (#3). CF7 is found 6,41% of the times our tool WPThemeDetector analyses a WP site.

    That at least is what our statistics say. You can see the Top 25 WordPress plugins here: http://www.wpthemedetector.com/top-wordpress-plugins/

    You can´t see Gravity Forms appearing on our reports because it is currently #36, and we´re only displaying the top 25 plugins. I´ve just taken a look at our database to see where it was ranking.

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  5. I hope you didn’t just fuck up the tool we use to monitor other COMMERCIAL non-free to download online form solutions.

    We use Datanyze to monitor paid competitors. I don’t care how many blogs use Contact Form 7. Especially given Datanyze is a PAID service, and an expensive one at that.

    If the data is flooded plugins that mean nothing to us from a business standpoint, it’s going to be highly annoying.

    If you want to know how many sites are running Contact Form 7, etc. Look on WordPress.org.

    For those that may say we only use it for marketing, I think if we did that we’d have the data splashed on our homepage. We use it to monitor other businesses internally.

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    • For anyone curious I can sum up the WordPress.org free plugin space…

      – JetPack Forms will be #1 in terms of overall marketshare.
      – Contact Form 7 will be #2.

      After those 2 there are a wide variety of free plugins to download in the repository, all with quite similar marketshare.

      – Ninja Forms
      – Formidable
      – Smart Forms
      – Optin Forms
      – X-Forms

      Multiple pages worth of form plugins in the repository.

      None of whom’s analytics are useful to us (as in my company) from a business standpoint.

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      • I’ll also add that Alexa’s data isn’t 100% accurate analytics. It’s a sample and nothing else.

        Don’t look at those numbers and assume that is what they really are, because the numbers are actually much much higher across the board. It’s not Google Analytics.

        Here’s a good article that details exactly what i’m saying:

        http://blog.kissmetrics.com/free-analytics-accuracy/

        There are FAR more sites using our products than what are returned in that data and there are far more sites using the other products returned in that data.

        What it is good for, for us, is a strong sample to compare with. While the analytics are not 100% complete, it’s enough of a sample to draw conclusions from which is why it has any value at all to businesses.

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        • They aren’t saying it is a representation of all sites everywhere, just the top 1 million sites that they rank/analyze. Even as a snapshot with those limitations, it is still very interesting. I would have guessed that Wufoo would have been closer to even.

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