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The 32 Largest ExpressionEngine Sites, January 2010

January 21, 2010

People often ask us, “Can ExpressionEngine handle my potentially HUGE SITE TRAFFIC and storage requirements? Because I’m planning to get [one gazzillion hits or something like that] and I might go with Wordpress instead.”

The answer is: Yes, EE can handle your traffic (if you pay for appropriate hosting!). But it’s been hard to back that up with concrete examples of enormous sites, because there wasn’t any single list of large, successful ExpressionEngine-powered Web sites. Well, last year, that changed—we published here a list of the 10 top sites, and it’s been a regularly visited resource ever since. But a year has passed, and times change. Limiting it to the top 10 left out some amazing sites. Also, I made a New Year’s resolution to update the damn thing.  So here, freshly updated, is the current definitive list of the 32 largest ExpressionEngine Web sites. (Why 32? If you have to ask, you’re not a programmer.)

But Wait: What exactly defines “largest”?

That’s a tough question, because some sites that have a huge amount of visitors might still be just one page in scope. Or a site that serves a niche audience and has a low Alexa ranking globally might have crazy active forums. We consulted with many other EE professionals to come up with the following factors, which seemed to be the most relevant ones 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 about more than 150 candidate sites, I came up with the ranking you see here, which was based on all the data I gathered plus a little bit of what I like to call “judgement” and you might call “Arbitrary Dart Throwing.” However, I guarantee that you’ll be impressed, and surprised, by this list.

The 32 Largest ExpressionEngine Web sites, January 2010



Please let me know of any missing sites, either in the comments or by contacting me directly. Thanks!
  1. Change.gov: Transition site for Barack Obama
  2. allkpop: Korean celebrity news
  3. iLounge: All about iPod and iPhone
  4. Peri?dicos Z?calo: newspaper in Mexico
  5. Totally NSFW: adult content (porn)
  6. Red Flag Deals: shopping deals
  7. The Frisky: celebrity news
  8. Gear Live: gadget news
  9. SpeedTV: NASCAR news
  10. Top Gear: BBC car show

  11. paidContent.org: news about online content
  12. DipNote: : U.S. Dept. of State’s blog
  13. A List Apart: resource for CSS and design
  14. BMI Music: music licensing and artist
  15. Smart Bargains: shopping deals
  16. Pep Boys: car parts
  17. Campaign Monitor: email campaign tool
  18. Trend Hunter: trends and gossip
  19. Truthdig: independent political news
  20. Kukla’s Korner: hockey fans

  21. Free Games: That’s what it is
  22. VK Magazine: Dutch news
  23. Grist: environmental news and commentary
  24. Orthodox Union: Jewish kosher resource
  25. Jewish Journal: large jewish newspaper in Los Angeles
  26. CA Government: central page for California’s Gov’t
  27. Univ. of Miami: college site
  28. GOP Site: U.S. political party
  29. Cisco’s Blogs: computer hardware maker
  30. Veerle’s Blog: known Web designer
  31. ABA Journal: lawyer society news
  32. Vancouver Library: city library system

(Items in bold are new since last year.)

The largest confirmed traffic I was told of belongs to iLounge, 20,000,000 pages per month, but All K Pop has 31,000,000 pages a month, unconfirmed. iLounge also has the most forum posts I know of: a mind-blowing 1,300,000. The largest number of entries I know of is JewishJournal.com: 55,000. 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 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 current 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.

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.

If you’d like to see the first version of this from May 2009, click here.

To add information or suggest another site, send me an email: nep@hopstudios.com

Posted by Travis Smith at 9:33 PMTracker Pixel for Entry

Comments

Just to add to your list, we’ve been using expressionengine to run pauladeen.com for the last 20 months. In the last 30 days we’ve had 1.1M unique visitors and served 6.2M pages.

We’ve had no major issues with Expressionengine, our main issue last year was during the holidays (Thanksgiving and Christmas) when our traffic increases by a factor of about 8 we killed our mysql server. After a few optimizations we’ve had no further problems. Great product that makes our lives a lot easier.

By Phil Peterman from Savannah, GA on Jul 4, 2010

Wow, I didn’t realize how many big sites were running on ExpressionEngine, can’t wait to see what the end of the year brings or even next year

By Danny from TX, USA on Jul 24, 2010

We?ve had no major issues with Expressionengine, our main issue last year was during the holidays (Thanksgiving and Christmas) when our traffic increases by a factor of about 8 we killed our mysql server. After a few optimizations we?ve had no further problems. Great product that makes our lives a lot easier.

By aboutquran on Feb 22, 2011

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