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16 Apr 2025

What we can learn from Python docs analytics

Documentation analytics can provide us with insights on our community

Thibaud Colas

Thibaud Colas

Wagtail core team

A few weeks ago I learned the docs.python.org Plausible analytics are publicly available, which is pretty cool! Here are interesting patterns in those docs that can be insightful for people building in this space.

The most visited page is… virtual environments

Creation of virtual environments is the most visited page aside from the site’s homepage. 85% of visits are coming through search, while for the rest of the site the "search" traffic is on the order of 50%.

Table of pages by visitors

The search terms do tell a clear story:

  • "python venv"
  • "python create venv"
  • "python virtual environment"
  • "venv"
  • "venv python"
  • "python environment"
  • "create venv python"
  • "create virtual environment python"

This is a clear sign if there ever was one that this aspect of the language isn’t intuitive. Reflecting on this with colleagues, it was clear no one amongst us was visiting that page – perhaps indicating this is more common of a need for people getting started?

Our Wagtail getting started tutorial has extensive info about virtual environments as this is a common pain point for beginners, but our material is more how-to, perhaps there is a need for more fundamental information.

Windows is the most popular OS. By a lot.

Python docs OS analytics table, with Windows at the top. Windows at 56.9%, macOS next at 20%

57% of traffic is from Windows, compared to 20% for macOS, and on the order of 9-10% for Linux. This differs sharply from the results of the 2023 Python Developers survey, where Windows and Linux were side by side at 55%.

Python developer survey operating system use. Windows and Linux at 55%

This could be an indication of how many developers are dual-booting, or using Windows Subsystem for Linux (WL), or simply in how much bias there is in those surveys – where you only get data from people who did find their way to the survey.

Mobile usage at 13%

13.5% if we generously include "tablet" devices. This can either mean that some Python development happens on mobile devices, or that people check out the docs on a different device than they code on (classroom environment? Offline coding on the move?).

Python is big in Europe

I wrote about that one a few weeks ago, and re-did the analysis but adjusting for population. Here are the top 20 countries ranked by number of docs visitors per 100k people (so per capita but more readable):

  1. 902 – Singapore
  2. 778 – Hong Kong
  3. 537 – Switzerland
  4. 477 – Finland
  5. 462 – Luxembourg
  6. 442 – Gibraltar
  7. 442 – Sweden
  8. 419 – Netherlands
  9. 393 – Israel
  10. 375 – Norway
  11. 374 – Iceland
  12. 354 – Canada
  13. 351 – Denmark
  14. 334 – United Kingdom
  15. 333 – Estonia
  16. 329 – Monaco
  17. 326 – Liechtenstein
  18. 301 – Ireland
  19. 299 – United States
  20. 297 – Germany

Visualised on a map, it looks like this:

world map with countries with a lot of python docs visitors highlighted in green

This isn’t necessarily very insightful as this completely hides more granular city-level or regional details, like how many Python users there are in Bengaluru, California, or Sidney.

Wagtail docs analytics

For the Wagtail docs, we’re happy users of Read the Docs, which provides us with basic analytics – pages ranked by page view. If anyone would find this data interesting to share publicly please let us know and we’ll export it all! For now, here is the top 10 over the last 30 days:

  1. 6245 - Getting Started tutorial
  2. 4775 - Home
  3. 2219 - Topics - Pages
  4. 2078 - Getting Started index
  5. 1556 - StreamField blocks reference
  6. 1500 - Topics - StreamField
  7. 1479 - Extended tutorial index
  8. 1366 - Extended tutorial homepage
  9. 1255 - Topics - Images
  10. 1236 - Getting Started demo site

What it means for Wagtail

All in all, this is super interesting information (thank you to the Python people who put in the work!). For projects like Wagtail – we clearly need to take good care that both the software works well on Windows, and our contributor tools do too. Make sure our docs resources work well on mobile. That our events are suitably reachable by our community (see you at DjangoCon Europe 2025 next week?).

And that we adjust our documentation and support resources based on what people are looking for! The new news template in particular is a direct attempt at making it easier for newcomers to try out Wagtail faster.

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