Why Should You Use Bootstrap?

Why Should You Use Bootstrap?

Released in 2011, Bootstrap has become increasingly popular among front-end developers. Many more are using this front-end development framework for their websites. There are hundreds of thousands of live websites out there that are created using bootstrap dashboards.

Below are some of the reasons that make bootstrap so popular.

Easy to get started

If you are new to developing and want to create your own stunning, responsive website, then again Bootstrap is the right choice. All you need is some basic understanding of HTML, CSS and some JavaScript and you are good to go. 

Also if you want to get started on your project right away, Bootstrap is the right choice for you. There are plenty of templates, themes, and tools that will help you get started building a website. All you need now is to customize the templates if you need a unique look.

Speed of development

If you want to reduce the time of development and want to launch an application as quickly as possible, then go right ahead and get the ready-made blocks of code that Bootstrap allows you to use. This can save you a ton of time in development as you don’t have to start everything from scratch and also give you can make it your own with your own inputs.

Bootstrap also has ready-made themes and templates that you can choose from. There are plenty of other resources also that provides you with free and premium themes and templates. All you need to do now is download them, make some changes to suits your needs because let’s face it if you have downloaded a template chances are someone else has too. You wouldn’t want your website to look exactly like someone else’s too.

Huge number of resources and a huge support community

Bootstrap has a huge number of resources available online on their official website and on other websites too. Bootstrap official website itself provides a great documentation and that is really helpful in creating a new website and has a lot of themes and templates that you can use. So you don’t really have to go much far to get started and go on with bootstrap.

At the same time, you can go outside the bootstrap website and look for resources provided by other websites. There are plenty of websites that provide tutorials, even more, collection of themes, templates, plugins, UI Kits, etc that you can select according to your taste and include in your project.

The bootstrap support community is huge. So if you run into any issue that you and Google cannot figure out, post your issue or your question into these communities and there are a lot of people, expert people that are ready to help you out.

Bootstrap gets updated continuously and the creators always provide these updates in a timely manner. Bootstrap is currently being hosted, developed and maintained at Github with 15996 commits and with 851 contributors at the time of writing. 

Responsiveness

A website that requires zooming in and out when used on a mobile device doesn’t make up for a good user experience. Users would like to use a website that is compatible with the size of the screen that they are using. One that doesn’t make you zoom in or out just for reading the content of the website. This is what a responsive website do. They scale up or down to the screen size of the device they are being used on, only show certain parts that are required and hide some parts that are not significant, toggle selections etc. Bootstrap is a great choice for making a responsive website. With the great fluid grid system and responsive utility classes creating a responsive website is a smooth and easy task.

Now Bootstrap is mobile first. That means developing a website is primarily for a mobile device and then you add responsive behavior to devices with increasing screen sizes. Which makes sense given the rate with which mobile data traffic is increasing and is likely to surpass  PC traffic by the year 2020. 

Customizable

Now another reason to use Bootstrap is that it can be easily customized. If you don’t have time to create a website from scratch and you use a template to kick-start your project but at the same time you need a distinct and unique look, then you can customize it. All you need to do is create your own custom CSS file and make changes and include the CSS file in the HTML code of your original website. Voila! There you have your own unique website.

Another way of customizing Bootstrap is to customize it at the time of download. Bootstrap allows you to change the defaults values of the variables and not include components, plugins etc that you will not be needing. All you now need to do is compile and download your custom version of bootstrap in their customize page. Excluding the components that you do not need helps decrease the bootstrap file size that you download.

Consistency

To meet the front end requirements, developers used almost any library they were familiar with into their projects. These inconsistencies in individual applications made it difficult to scale and maintain them. This was primarily the reason for the birth of Bootstrap.

Bootstrap makes sure of one thing: no matter who is working on the project results are uniform across every platform, one of the main reason to use bootstrap. Be it Chrome, Firefox or Internet Explorer. Consistency was the primary reason Bootstrap was developed. 

And the best of it all… it’s open source

Bootstrap was developed in 2010 in Twitter as solution to the challenges they faced during the development of the user interface. They improved the framework by taking feedbacks from the engineers and realizing its potential, it was released as open source in the year 2011. And there on it grew to become the most popular front-end development framework.

So that sums up some of the reasons that one should use Bootstrap

Statistics

The number of websites created using bootstrap is ever increasing. Bootstrap has become very popular and shown a tremendous increase in the market share which is evident with all the statistics since the date it released. Here are some statistics that show bootstrap remarkable growth.

According to builtwith.com the number of active websites at present using bootstrap is 12,810,580 (and counting).

Taking a look at the graph taken from Google Trends for the keyword ‘Bootstrap’, from the data for the past five years, we can see that the keyword search has been increasing.

Another very impressive and detailed statistics for the usage of bootstrap is given in SimilarTech  This site has given statistics on the number of websites using Bootstrap, a number of websites using Bootstrap in different categories, A list of top websites using Bootstrap, geographic comparison of countries using bootstrap. It also compares bootstrap with other javascript libraries and provides a very neat statistical comparison on the number of websites using each technology, market share, categories, and geography.

Another statistical analysis can be found in W3techs This website shows the statistics of market share and the usage data of bootstrap as a javascript library. This website shows updated data to the date.  You can also compare different javascript libraries with bootstrap here. Also, the statistics on the number of websites that changed to or from bootstrap here.

Wrappalyzer gives the market leaders in the category of web frameworks and bootstrap is the leader by 66% of the market share. This is 67 web frameworks that Wrappalyzer compares.

A list of companies using bootstrap is provided by HG Data.

 

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