Blog

The 15 Largest ExpressionEngine sites May 2009

May 13, 2009

Update June 16: How popular is Korean celebrity news? AllKPop.com is now the 10th largest EE site, and is growing like bamboo! I didn’t update the whole article, just the chart.

If you know of a large site, even if you think it’s not top-10 worthy, let me know in the comments or by contacting me. Thanks!

Update May 20: After adding A List Apart, Kukla’s Korner and Gov.ca.gov, I decided to expand the list to the top 15. The order is slightly different now.

Update May 15: I’ve had a number of good suggestions for big sites, and one has definitely made it into the top ten: Top Gear, the BBC racing show. I’m also tipped to two more “can’t-tell-you” sites about which I’m trying to find out. Stay tuned.

Clients often ask us, “Can your preferred CMS, ExpressionEngine, handle my HUGE site requirements? I’m planning to get [one gazzillion hits or something like that].”

The answer is yes (if you pay for proper hosting!), but it’s been hard to back that up with concrete examples of enormous sites, because there’s hasn’t been any single list of large, successful ExpressionEngine-powered Web sites. Well, that’s all about to change: Here, then, is the definitive list of the 10 largest ExpressionEngine Web sites.

What exactly defines “largest”? That’s a tough question, because a site that has a huge amount of traffic might be just one page. Or a site that serves a niche audience and has a low Alexa ranking might have crazy active forums. Consulting with other EE professionals, these factors seemed to be the most relevant ones that we should use to determine “largeness”:

number of unique visitors and pages / month
number of entries and comments
number of members and forum posts
awards and buzz

Combining all these data points gathered by investigating more than 50 potentially “large” sites, I came up with the ranking you see here, which was based on all the numbers I gathered plus a little bit of what I like to call “judgement” and you might call “shameful ignorance.”

The largest confirmed traffic I was told of belongs to iLounge: 20,000,000 pages per month. iLounge also has the most forum posts: a mind-blowing 1,300,000. The largest number of entries I know of is JewishJournal.com: 70,000. But there’s another site, ou.org, that apparently has WAY more entries—I just wasn’t able to confirm it.

Here are the caveats: I do think that Change.gov and Peri?dicos Z?calo might have higher traffic, but I wasn’t able to verify their numbers. And you might consider it a bit of a “cheat”, but I’m including Change.gov as of its peak traffic in January 2009, not as of its May 2009 traffic. I also left ExpressionEngine’s own site out of the rankings, but they do have a very large site with a very large number of members and posts, and would rank close to if not in the top 10. Other large sites include: Sundance Film Festival, ou.org, gov.ca.gov, abajournal.com and the Vancouver Public Library (which has more than 60 editors using it), but I wasn’t able to confirm enough information or they didn’t quite make the top ten.

The raw data is available for you, too, to look at. Take a look:

Click here to view the spreadsheet directly

If you think I’ve left any significant sites out, mention it in the comments and I’ll research it. The spreadsheet is a living document, so it may over time show a different ranking than the list in this article does. Special thanks to the folks on Twitter who chipped in with suggestions, and to the folks who couldn’t help me on the record. Oh, and does anyone know of a similar resource for MT or WP?

Posted by Travis Smith at 11:28 AM Tracker Pixel for Entry

Comments

How come the Firefox Expression Engine Detector add-on does not recognized Change.gov as an EE site? All the other sites listed get recognized as such. Bug in the plugin? Or is Change.gov not really an EE site?

By Marc from Chicago on May 14, 2009

Marc,

“Absence of proof is not proof of absence”—so while that EE detector doesn’t alert us, a look at the source code at a page like this one: http://change.gov/page/s/yourstory does show the telltale ACT and XID and search/results format of an EE site.

Also, I did hear from Blue State Digital that it’s an EE site.

TTFN
Travis

By Travis Smith from Vancouver, BC on May 14, 2009

May I humbly submit http://twitchfilm.net/ which, is a site that I worked on?

I was comparing its stats with some of the sites you have listed, and I think it holds up pretty well.

By Jason from Lincoln, NE on May 14, 2009

I designed and led the development of http://diabetes.ca home ,of the Canadian Diabetes Association, which does fairly well by some of your standards. 945,000 pageviews per month?

By Mike Mella from Toronto, Canada on May 14, 2009

Aw, man. So close! Can’t you make it the top 15 or something?

By cybele on May 14, 2009

Please run the numbers on www.kuklaskorner.com.

Basic entry/comments stats can be found at the bottom of their page.

By Kevin Shoesmith from Vancouver on May 15, 2009

@Marc - Change.gov is on ExpressionEngine as are several other Obama administration related websites. We worked closely with the team behind the site (<a href=“http://bluestatedigital.com”>Blue State Digital); we even created new functionality specifically for Change.gov. The new features created for Change.gov were then released for the entire community in EE 1.6.6 and 1.6.7.

By Leslie Camacho on May 15, 2009

Thanks. My faith in the FF add-on is shaken a little. I would have taken your word on it right away had I not installed the add-on 2 days ago. :D

By Marc from Chicago on May 15, 2009

@Marc - I’m not sure I trust that add-on. The author is lying about his location on his domain address registration. He says he lives in Bend, OR and he used EllisLab’s business address to register the domain. He does not work for us, he is not in Bend, OR and I’d say its a fair bet his name is not Richard.

Personally I wouldn’t install anything where the author isn’t honest about his identity and goes so far as to take part of someone else’s.

By Leslie Camacho on May 15, 2009

www.12ozprophet.com uses ExpressionEngine. According to Quantcast, they get ~3.8 million pageviews/month. The forum uses vBulletin, but I think they’re in the process of switching over to the EE forums.

By luke from Grand Rapids, MI on May 15, 2009

As a Top Gear fan, I have to make a correction about your description. It’s not a racing show. There are sometimes racing _elements_ but it’s primarily and always will be a CAR show. They review cars and have antics related to cars, that may or may not be related to racing anything.

By Lea on May 17, 2009

Hi Travis, thanks for adding our BBC Topgear suggestion. We at Glue Interactive Media are also very passionate about the ExpressionEngine CMS. Keep up the good work!

By GlueWebdesign from Europe/Belgium on May 27, 2009

Boy I’d love to see the Control Panel for a couple of those sites.

By Will on Jun 11, 2009

ExpressionEngine code is pretty amazing to be able to handle that many pageviews. Excellent work!

By Grand Rapids LASIK from Grand Rapids, MI on Jul 25, 2009

I was under the impression that Speedtv.com was running on ExpressionEngine, built by the guys at MindComet. Got any info on that one? Thanks for making this list, very interesting stuff.

By John on Aug 30, 2009

@John That’s correct. Speedtv.com is running on ExpressionEngine. I was on the team that built it. It would probably fit in the top 5 of the sites on this list.

By Sean Murphy on Sep 3, 2009

Change.gov is finally starting to decrease a little. When this post was written it was completely off the charts. Interesting to see I-lounge so high.

By Josh on Sep 4, 2009

Not that it will make the top 15, but I’ll submit a site we recently designed for a great firm here. Includes some custom module work to handle membership and product transactions.

http://nextgenerationconsulting.com/

Thanks to Ellis Labs for making a great product, and to you for letting us know other folks doing good work with EE.

By Ben Hirby from Planet Propaganda - Madison, WI on Sep 4, 2009

Our site, Hearth.com, uses EE for most of our content including a busy forum.
http://www.hearth.com/goldreport/general2.html
shows some of our high traffic from last year. At 450K plus visitors in a busy month and 2.6 million plus page views, I think we are in the top EE sites.

We use a single dedicated server to serve the site.

By Craig from New England on Sep 7, 2009

Thanks. My faith in the FF add-on is shaken a little. I would have taken your word on it right away had I not installed the add-on three days ago.

By GaDizayn from England on Oct 18, 2009

Yes! All K Pop made it to the top 10! I love that site and I love being updated with the latest Korean celebrities news.
Valentin Imperial Maya

By Judith from United States on Nov 17, 2009

Congratulations to the Top 15, especially to Gear Live. I’m actually a frequent visitor of that site.
New Jersey Flower

By Mary from United States on Nov 23, 2009

Yes! All K Pop made it to the top 10! I love that site and I love being updated with the latest Korean celebrities news.

By sikiş from germany on Nov 23, 2009

I have a feeling All K Pop will climb its way to the top of this chart. That site is simply awesome.

By golf car cart accessories from United States on Nov 27, 2009

All K Pop Top 10 to it made! I love that site and I like being updated with the latest Korean celebrity news.

By Health Journal from adnames on Dec 14, 2009

It’s no wonder Gear Live is ranked 4th. I often visit the site to check for the latest gears and the newest games.

By Waste Tire Hauler Bonds from United States on Dec 17, 2009

There’s some interesting ExpressionEngine trends at http://trends.builtwith.com/cms/Expression-Engine which you might find interesting!

By Gary from Sydney on Dec 17, 2009

Online Şeker ve Çikolata Ürünleri Satış Firması

Kurumsal Çikolata Kutuda Kurumsal Çikolata,Yılbaşı Sepetleri, Erkek Bebek Çikolatası, Kız Bebek Çikolatası,Resim Baskılı Çikolata, Yılbaşı Çikolatası, Sevgiliye Çikolata,Tebrik Çikolataları,Sünnet Çikolataları, Doğum Günü Çikolatası,Anneler İçin Çikolatalar, Babalar için Çikolatalar, Bayram Çikolataları, Spesiyal Çikolatalar Satışını Yapmaktayız.

By Bebek Çikolatası on Feb 4, 2012

ExpressionEngine: Total Guests and Most Visitors
January 31, 2012
Book Now!
January 30, 2012
Innovation for a Stanford Journal
January 3, 2012
Our First Ever eBook
December 12, 2011
Come Reignite a Vancouver #EECMS Meetup on Nov. 30
November 24, 2011
The 20 Largest ExpressionEngine Sites
October 14, 2011 (97 comments)
Pop Quiz!
August 31, 2011 (4 comments)
Job Opening: Web Developer
August 17, 2011

Work	604.408.5722
	604.357.5001
	our address

Blog

The 15 Largest ExpressionEngine sites May 2009

Largest ExpressionEngine Web sites, May 2009

Comments

Add Your Comment

RSS Feed