The Bootstrap Boom is Just Getting Started

Lately, I’ve been giving a few presentations about Bootstrap, the CSS framework.
It’s fun to demonstrate how easy and powerful Bootstrap can be.
However, the web moves so quickly that people are reluctant to learn a new technology that might be obsolete next year.
In preparation for another presentation earlier this week, I dug up some statistics on Bootstrap’s growth. My aim was show that Bootstrap is here to stay. The results surprised even me.
I checked a variety of sources from the number of sites and WordPress themes using Bootstrap, to the number of Google searches and the number of Github forks. These sources show an explosion in Bootstrap’s popularity, even over just the last 3 months.
There’s strong evidence to suggest we may only be in the early stages of the Bootstrap boom.
Number of sites
By some estimates, Bootstrap now powers 1% of the web. Meanpath.com runs a source code search engines and they recently used it on a random selection of 100 million websites, They found clear Twitter Bootstrap signatures on 981,608 of them, or just a tiny fraction under 1%.
BuiltWith.com shows that Bootstrap reached an inflection point in just the last couple of months.

Bootstrap’s usage in the top 10,000, the top 100,000 and the top 1 million sites is now between 1.6% and 2.8%, depending on how which measurement you use.

Search trends
I used Google Trends to estimate the popularity of searches for “Bootstrap” (the blue line) and “Twitter Bootstrap” (the red line).
Bootstrap was open sourced in August 2011. You can searches start to increase almost immediately.:

Google breaks out the searches so we know these searches genuinely related to Bootstrap:

Adoption
The major convert to Bootstrap so far has been Joomla. Bootstrap shipped in the core of the Joomla 3 release:

In the WordPress world, I looked in January this year and only found 8 WordPress themes with Boostrap and several weren’t on WordPress.org.
There are now 30 themes on WordPress.org alone that support Bootstrap. If you look at the posting dates of the themes, you see that 20 of the 30 themes were added in just the last 3 months, since June 2013:

Beyond the CMS’s, the web is swimming with free and commercial Bootstrap theme sites. Themeforest has over 500 (more than all their CMS themes, except WordPress) and TemplateMonster has over 800 (more than Magento).
Github
In January 2012, Bootstrap had 2000 forks and 13,000 people following development.
In August 2012, Bootstrap had 7500 forks and was the 2nd most forked repository on Github.
In August 2013, Bootstrap is the most commonly forked Github project. It’s closing in on 20,000 forks with almost 60,000 followers.
Even on this quiet Tuesday afternoon, the Bootstrap repository was humming:

yup
lol
In all seriousness, a real portion of that boom is thanks to you, Kyle.
thx Steve. was joking around a bit, but the writing was on the wall, I just fought to solidify it in Joomla-dom
Cool… and I’ve just released yet another Joomla/Bootstrap baby [url=http://www.rmgnetworks.com/]http://www.rmgnetworks.com/[/url]
That’s great work Phil
Cheers Steve… that’s phase 1 done & dusted – onto phase 2 now with my cleanup chores & some new wizzy functionality 😉
That’s a beaut Phil, love the parallex stuff!
I thought that was the case; thanks for doing the legwork and sharing the numbers!
Does “inflection point” have a meaning in statistics that’s different from calculus — where I think it means a shift from negative to positive/a downward to upward curve, or vice versa? Looks like Bootstrap has only had negative growth for a one-month cycle at the end of 2012 when everyone was on holiday.
Thanks Dan.
Ah, I made a mistake with my terminology then.
No, Bootstrap hardly seems to have taken a step backwards at any point, but June / July of this year seems to show a rapid acceleration in growth.
Thanks Steve. Nice to see some data.
This is insane!