Most Used HTML Tags in 50 Popular Web Sites

Which are the most used HTML tags in web design? I received this curious question form a friend of mine some days ago and I tried to find an answer analyzing the HTML structure of a selection of 50 popular web sites that includes CNN, Time, New York Times, ABC, Apple, Reuters, Yahoo, Technorati, AOL, Amazon and here is the result.

The most used tag is the <a> tag and this is natural enough considering web sites are full of hyperlinks to internal and external pages. Often the <a> tag is used with the <li> tag to list links in specific page sections or implement navigation bars.

The second most frequent tag is the <div> tag that is used mainly to describe the elements that compose the structure of web pages (header, navigation bar, sidebar, footer) and more in general to represent block-level sections cannot be described by other HTML tags.

The third place is for the <p> tag. For their versatility <li> and <ul> tags are used in many different situation for example, as I said before, to describe sections of links and navigation bars. The <span> tag is often used to highlight particular inline text contents.

<h1> – <h6> are used for headings. <h1>, <h2>, and <h3> are more frequent than <h4>, <h5>, and <h6> tags. In some cases headings are also described by <div> instead of <h1> – <h6> tags.

Last place is for the <script> (yes, these pages are really full of scripts!).

Naturally these results are limited to a small sample of web sites but I think can be quite indicative for a general trend. What do you think? Do you use these tags with the same frequency?

  • Reply
    Brandon
    October 17, 2009 at 2:49 pm

    That sounds pretty accurate. It seems to me that the script tag should be farther down the list, because ideally you would want as few of those as possible in a page.

  • Reply
    h1brd
    October 17, 2009 at 3:50 pm

    pretty much the same tags are on my top list yeah :) just not the script one!!

  • Reply
    reg4c
    October 17, 2009 at 4:21 pm

    I would assume that there were more then since it is a many to one relationship: that confirms that there should be more then since it is the same. Of course these are assumptions.

  • Reply
    Helikopter Design
    October 17, 2009 at 4:43 pm

    Number one for me would be the tag, but then again I have an ungodly case of divitis!

  • Reply
    Alexander
    October 17, 2009 at 5:17 pm

    Haha, I use the the div tag way too much in my websites. More than any other probably! I just like being overly organized >.<

  • Reply
    Bilal Çınarlı
    October 17, 2009 at 11:56 pm

    Last year Opera published a list of articles under the name of “MAMA” at their developer community page. The reports covers html structure usage, elements densities, script and css densities etc.

    http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/mama-key-findings/

    http://dev.opera.com/search/?term=mama

  • Reply
    Andy Mabbett
    October 18, 2009 at 1:49 am

    Google did this in December 2005, with a somewhat larger sample – over a billion documents: http://code.google.com/webstats/

  • Reply
    Webling
    October 18, 2009 at 2:13 am

    I always try to reduce the number of div-tags to a minimum. There are adequate blocklevel-elements and the code looks cleaner.

  • Reply
    Mantas
    October 18, 2009 at 12:52 pm

    Thats interesting, never found list like this, i think my favorite is :) such an easy tag :)

  • Reply
    agent.superdave
    October 19, 2009 at 3:11 am

    @Brandon: you want further down the list?!
    there are only 7 items in the list, and is at the bottom. where exactly do you propose putting it?

  • Reply
    agent.superdave
    October 19, 2009 at 3:54 am

    @Brandon: you want ‘script’ further down the list?!
    there are only 7 items in the list, and ‘script’ is at the bottom. where exactly do you propose putting it?

  • Reply
    Emmanuel De Oleo
    May 11, 2011 at 8:16 am

    I think one of the most useful tags are that allow us to perform many operations