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Used in over 9 million sites worldwide, React is one of the most popular UI Javascript libraries. In this blog, we’ll cover some of the most popular sites that use React, while sharing some insights from our front-end team.
Nine million is an impressive number, even more so when put into perspective. React’s biggest direct competitors usage is, according to Builtwith:
- Vue: 1,4 million sites
- Angular: 260,000 sites
- Preact: 285,000 sites
What’s more, 40% of the 10,000 sites with the highest traffic use React. That means big players trust the Javascript library.
What’s the Appeal of React?
“React is widely used by many top websites because of its high performance and easy creation of complex and dynamic user interfaces by breaking them down into smaller components,” explains Szymon, front-end team leader.
“In addition, React is actively developed, has a large community and the support of a huge company – Facebook – all this ensures great stability of the library, which is very important for large organizations.”
Read more: Should I Use React? We Talk Pros And Cons of UI JS Library.
Why Is It Important That React Is Used by Popular Sites?
You might be evaluating which stack to adopt in your next project. So you might ask yourself: why does it matter if a popular site uses this technology if my service or platform is different from it?
It matters a lot, actually!
“Large companies have many technological requirements. When big players such as PayPal and Netflix adopt React, they prove that it is a mature and stable technology that will be developed for a long time to come,” Szymon adds.
In other words, the stakes are high with big players, so they are extra careful with such choices. This informs us that, at the least, the technology is reliable and powerful. What about flexible?
“React being adopted also tells us that the community of developers around the project will grow, the current tools will be gradually improved and new ones will appear, thanks to which the library will be even more readily adopted by other companies.”
And these statistics are also useful if you are a developer looking to step up your Javascript game.
“Learning that big sites adopt React is good because it gives us very important yet simple information – ReactJS is worth learning and using!”
Popular Sites That Use React
With all that said, let’s get to the list of popular sites that use React.
Facebook – Big Problem, Big Solution
Seeing as Facebook came up with React in the first place, it’s not surprising that they represent a great use case for this UI Javascript library.
“Facebook created React to solve the problem of UI updates in complex applications having a large DOM tree,” explains Szymon. “The technology they used at that time made it more and more difficult to maintain the application, which began to slow down as new features were added.”
And response time had the utmost importance in a platform accessed by millions of users every day across different devices.
React was able to tackle problems for Facebook and its usefulness proved to be much broader. As a result, the Javascript library grew (and keeps growing).
It’s interesting to note that solving a need by creating new technology is not groundbreaking per se.
“They needed a better way to develop applications, and like most major companies of the time, they were more likely to develop their own tool than to use third-party tools (like Angular by Google, which was very popular at the time).”
Reddit – Using AMP Components
Reddit is a powerhouse. Since its launch in 2005, it has amassed over 400 million users. Extensive and engaged user base at that: the platform is known for “breaking” servers of unsuspecting sites that go viral.
The front-end developer Joanna remembers a blog post shared by Reddit in 2016 describing their newly adopted approach to developing their product.
“As the mobile part of the business was growing, they started using AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages by Google) to ensure that pages would load instantly from search results on devices. They had built it as a Node.js app using React and Redux,” she explains.
The article, “AMP and React+Redux: Why Not?”, points out that the reasoning behind the decision was more about people and productivity than the code itself.
Joanna considers that, at first glance, that may seem odd. After all, Reddit is an app that essentially renders static markup.
“But, as Reddit claims, React is effective and works smoothly. It lets them use AMP components to build views with consistency with their other React projects without ‘adding glue’ for each new component.”
Netflix – Let’s Talk About Sharing
Netflix is one of the most discussed cases of React-powered services.
Their post from 2015, Netflix Likes React. Facebook’s React library, couldn’t be clearer. They predicted improvements in startup speed, runtime performance, and modularity. Cited advantages of React: isomorphic JavaScript, virtual DOM rendering, and support for compositional design patterns.
Much has been said about Netflix’s journey, but one aspect is not mentioned enough: how they share knowledge.
The blog above is one of many great pieces they shared about the inner workings of the platform. Some articles about React date as far back as 2013!
“It’s very interesting to read technical blog posts from companies like Netflix because we can find out what the company is working on, what problems it has encountered and how it solved them, and also find out the reasons for some decisions affecting, for example, how a particular application works,” accentuates Szymon.
Netflix has many posts on its blog about the changes they have made to the site, including a lot about ReactJS, Node, and isomorphic JS. “They also describe how the combination of these tools reduced the initial start time and lowered the time to interactive,” Szymon adds.
BBC – 83% Better Page Performance
BBC World Services, which hosts news sites in over 40 languages, migrated to React over the course of 12 months. They talked about the process and positive results in a November 2020 blog post.
“In the case of the BBC, the problem with their websites was the poor performance,” notes Szymon.
BBC knew that, for the end-user, it’s essential to have a smooth navigation experience. Additionally, search engines such as Google overtly favor pages with better performance.
Since they were reliant on older PHP, they started looking for other solutions to speed up the website.
“Changing the technology to React in conjunction with NodeJS allowed for the creation of a proprietary solution (Simorgh) that allows them to build websites that meet the high requirements of the BBC World Service.”
They reported an 83% improvement in page performance due to the significantly reduced weight of files and the use of server-side rendering.
Another benefit is that React also gave them the ability to reuse code in many places.
“They even created a BBC storybook where you can see the most commonly used React components on their websites.”
Conclusion – (More) Popular Sites That Use React
In this article, we took a look at some of the most popular sites that use React.
However, the list (even of big industry players) is extensive. Some examples: Instacart, OkCupid, CNN, Khan Academy, Asana and Atlassian, and UberEats.
We hope our insights provide quality food for thought whether you are looking for the next stack for your project or for the next JS library to study.
