Statistics

How Many Websites Are There Around the World? [2022]

Dmytro Tsybuliak

LinkedIn

June 11, 2022

1.2

1.2 B sites on the Internet

252

252K sites created daily

199.5

199.5 M sites active

544.7

544.7 M domains registered

25

25 B web pages indexed by Google

The Internet is becoming an increasingly significant part of our daily lives. We believe that many readers spend more time communicating through screens in their daily lives than they do physically. One thing is certain: the role of the World Wide Web will increase, encompassing work, leisure, entertainment, relationships, and other life spheres.

Every minute, the "size" of the web is increasing through the posting of user-generated content, blogs, and the uploading of various files. Literally, as you read this article, the information in it is slowly becoming out-of-date. All figures presented in this material are not final but draw a line in one of the periods of growth of the Internet.

CHAPTER 1

How Many People Are Using the Internet in 2021?

The International Telecommunication Union has published new statistics on the users number of the World Wide Web. In 2000, the Internet was used by 400 million people. That's just under 7% of the world's population.

Thanks to the report Digital 2021 done by We Are Social and Hootsuite, now we can conclude how many people in the world are using the Internet and social networks. It is claimed that the number of Internet users around the world is 4.8 billion people. That's a little more than 60% of the world's population. Social networks are used by 4.48 billion people or almost 57% of the population. There are even more cell phone users - more than 5 billion, or 66.9% of the population.

* According to WeAreSocial and Hootsuite survey
Population 7,87 billion -
Mobile phone users 5,27 billion 66,9% of population
Internet users 4,8 billion 60,9% of population
Social media users 4,48 billion 56,8% of population

The expansion rate of the World Wide Web remains stable and shows no signs of slowing down. Let's put it in perspective: the average global population growth rate is now about 1%, and the Internet expansion rate is 8.2% per year. Until 2005, there were less than 1 billion active users on the planet, but it took 16 years to increase that number to 4.66 billion.



Jul 2020 vs Jul 2021

* According to WeAreSocial and Hootsuite survey
Population +1% +80 M
Mobile phone users +2,3% +117 M
Internet users +5,7% +257 M
Social media users +13,1% +520 M

Traditionally, the region with the highest level of Internet usage is Asia. Of the 4.66 billion Internet users, about 2.4 billion live in China and other Asian countries.

Nevertheless, the fastest-growing group of users is located in Africa - 5 out of 10 new users are registered on this very continent, which in past years has lagged far behind in digital technology.

Hootsuite presents statistics on the percentage of a country's population to the number of Internet users. The top 10 countries with the highest percentage are:

The top 10 countries with the highest percentage
Denmark 99%
UAE 99%
South Korea 98%
U.K. 98%
Sweden 97%
Switzerland 97%
Netherlands 96%
Saudi Arabia 96%
Canada 95%
Germany 95%

And the top three countries with the lowest percentage are:

The top 3 countries with the lowest percentage
Nigeria 51%
India 47%
Kenya 42%

In total, a person now spends almost 7 hours on the Internet from all devices on a daily basis. If you calculate it, it turns out to be more than 48 hours or 2 full days a week. This figure accounts for an average of 3 hours watching TV, 2.5 hours on social media, 1.5 hours listening to music, etc.

CHAPTER 2

How Many Websites Are There in the World?

How the Number of Websites in the World was Growing

In 1991, physicist Tim Berners-Lee, while working for the European Organization for Nuclear Research, created the world's first web server, website, and browser. He hosted the first World Wide Web site on August 6, 1991, on the httpd Web server. Two years later, the organization made the World Wide Web technology free to all users on a pro bono basis. This way, the Internet became publicly available.

In 1994, there were 2,700 sites on the World Wide Web. That was the year when the first search engines appeared - Jerry's Guide to the World Wide Web, which was later renamed Yahoo! In 1995, there were 23.5 thousand websites on the Internet, in 1996 - almost ten times more. At the time of Google's registration in 1998, the number of sites has reached a mark of 2.4 million. In 2001, there were already 29.2 million websites. The first milestone of 1 billion was passed in 2016.

2017 1.8 B
2018 1.8 B
2019 1.5 B
2020 1.3 B
2021 1.2 B

The statistics may seem surprising, showing a decrease in the number of websites. But it represents the total number of both active and inactive websites. Moreover, these are constantly fluctuating values.

If we turn to the annual statistics for active sites only, we get a very different picture.

2017 172,3 M
2018 171,6 M
2019 182,2 M
2020 189 M
2021 200 M

The Current Number of Websites Around the World

To date, the total number of sites in the world is about 1,188,038,392 according to the Web Server Survey conducted by NetCraft and published in late September 2021 (keep in mind that this number changes literally every second, right as you're reading this article).

Are All of These Sites Active?

Not every one of the 1.2 billion sites is active or used in any way. According to the latest figures from Netcraft, as of September 2021, there are only 199,463,687 sites active. Doing the simplest math, we get only 16.6% of the total number of all sites.

Are All of These Sites Visited by Humans Only?

Surprisingly, humans are not the only users of the web. A huge part of the Internet traffic is created by robots, and this share is increasing every year.

According to the data published by the research company Imperva, which specializes in cybersecurity, the activity of malicious robotic programs (so called «bad» bots) on the Internet has reached a record high of 25.6% of all web traffic. They are used to scam traffic, get fake subscribers, steal original content and personal data, crack passwords, send spam, etc. In turn, the so-called “good bots” are used officially by companies to index search traffic (GoogleBot), compare prices for a certain product on different sites, search for plagiarism, etc.

*According to Imperva survey
People 59,2% of traffic Increased by 5.7% in 2021
Bad bots 25,6% of traffic Increased by 6,2%
Good Bots 15,2% Increased by 16%

Imperva has pointed out that almost three quarters of "bad bots" traffic is caused by advanced persistent bots (APBs), randomly changing IP addresses and using anonymous proxy servers to fool bot detection systems and disguise themselves as humans. Most of the "bad bots" (55.4%) are created for the most popular browser, Google Chrome.

Most of the "bad bots" traffic comes from the USA - 45.9%, followed by the Netherlands with 8% and Canada with 6.3%. Most often, bot traffic coming from Russia is blocked (21.1% of all "bad bots" traffic blocked). Second place went to blocked traffic from China (19%). Romania is in third place with 8.6%. Imperva experts explain that many companies use blacklists depending on the geographical origin of their traffic (so-called geofencing), blocking visits to their sites from IP addresses of different countries.

CHAPTER 3

Internet Cybersecurity Statistics

Here are some statistics about the current state of cybersecurity:

  • 64% of companies have experienced cyberattacks of various kinds;
  • By 2021, cybercrime damage will reach $6 trillion per year;
  • 1 in 131 emails contain dangerous malware;
  • 80% of cyberattacks are due to weak or stolen passwords.

These impressive facts seem to be a reason for site owners to invest in improving its security.

Thousands of websites are hacked every day, and there are thousands of hacking attempts every minute. Many of these attacks can also be brief, some lasting less than 5 seconds.

The most commonly hacked CMS is WordPress, which accounts for over 90% of all CMS hacking attempts. However, this is largely due to its popularity. WordPress is now the leading CMS in the world and has almost 60% of the market.

CHAPTER 4

Domain Name Registration Statistics

With the expansion of the Web, the number of domain name registrations is also growing. According to current data provided by Verisign , there are now more than 367 million domain names registered (TLDs).

The most popular domain name extensions remain .com and .net, accounting for nearly 40% of all domain name registrations. Figures current as of the end of June 2021:

10 Largest TLDs in 2021



These statistics include all types of TLDs: ccTLDs; gTLDs.

  • ngTLDs;
  • ccTLDs;
  • gTLDs.
*According to Domainnamestat survey
10 Largest TLDs in 2021
.com 157M
.tk 24,7M
.cn 20,7M
.de 17,0M
.net 13,6M
.uk 11M
.org 10,4M
.nl 6,2M
.ru 5,7M
.br 4,8M

10 Largest ccTLDs in 2021



National domains (country-code Top-Level Domains - ccTLDs) are assigned by the international organization IANA (Internet Assigned Numbers Authority) in agreement with the Internet communities of countries following the international standard ISO 3166-1.

CcTLD .tk tops the list with more than 24M registrations. When it comes to country-code domain names, it is not surprising that China is one of the leaders in the list with almost 24 million registrations using the local .cn domain. Germany, with .de country code, has nearly 17 million domains and comes in a respectable third place.

In the chart, you can see the statistics of ccTLD names:

10 Largest ccTLDs in 2021
.tk 24,2M 11,14%
.cn 23,9M 11%
.de 21,7M 9,97%
.uk 18,5M 8,48%
.ru 9,9M 4,58%
.ga 7,2M 3,33%
.cf 6,2M 2,85%
.nl 6,1M 2,81%
.ml 6M 2,76%
.fr 4,9M 2,29%

10 Largest gTLDs in 2021



Generic top-level domains are created for the entire Internet community. There are 236,787,566 gTLDs domains registered, according to Domain Name Stat .

.com 203M 86%
.net 18,5M 8%
.org 14,5M 6,15%
.edu 8T 0,01%
.gov 8T 0,01%
.int 2T 0,01%
.mil 308 0,01%
.arpa 3 0,01%

10 Largest New gTLDs in 2021



The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) offered about 1,200 new top-level domains to increase the uniqueness and recognition of various websites. These domains have made it easier to find a site, bring in more traffic, and support the growing needs and demands of the global Internet community. These domains are called new generic TLDs. Let's take a look at the statistics related to the proliferation of ngTLDs.

There are 90,252,017 new gTLDs registered on the Internet. The top 10 are:

10 Largest New gTLDs in 2021
.xyz 8,4M 9,35%
.top 8,1M 8,98%
.icu 7,6M 8,44%
.info 7,3M 8,44%
.online 4,2M 4,74%
.site 4,1M 4,53%
.club 3,9M 4,43%
.biz 3,1M 3,51%
.loan 2,6M 2,92%
.vip 2,2M 2,51%

Overall Domain Statistics by TLD Type

TLD Type TLD Number Registered domains Domains Distribution
ngTLDs .xyz 8,4M 9,35%
gTLDs .top 8,1M 8,98%
cсTLDs .icu 7,6M 8,44%
All of them .info 7,3M 8,44%

Overall Domain Statistics by the Country



According to Domain Name Stat, domain names are distributed by country in this ratio:

Country Domain number %
Unknown 292,2M 53,66%
USA 105,3M 19,34%
China 23,5M 4,32%
Canada 16,4M 3,01%
Iceland 10,6M 1,95%
Netherlands 10M 1,84%
France 7,3M 1,35%
UK 6,9M 1,27%
Germany 6,2M 1,15%
Japan 5,9M 1,10%

All other countries have less than 1% in the ratio to the total.

5 Best Domain Name Registrars



Registrar is an organization that has obtained the rights to register domains, as well as to renew domain names. The status of the registrar is represented by a legal entity whose activities do not contradict the current legislation of the country and meet the standards and requirements of the state authorities.

Take a look at the statistics of the top registrars:

Registrar Domains registered Share
GoDaddy.com, LLC 74,8M 13,73%
NameCheap, Inc. 15,2M 2,82%
Tucows Domains Inc. 11,7M 2,15%
Google LLC 7,1M 1,31%
Network Solutions, LLC 6,8M 1,26%

CHAPTER 5

Have Internet Users’ Habits Changed?

Search habits of users have changed significantly this year. Users still turn to search engines to find the information they need. According to data provided by Hootsuite in the Global Digital 2021 report, 98% of people use a search engine at least once a month entering a text query. And 23,2% of them now also use voice search. Which is, as we can conclude, also a popular method of getting information in 2021. Most likely, this percentage will only grow in the future. According to data provided by TechCrunch, 55% of Internet users in the U.S. will own smart speakers in 2022.

Take a look at the list of countries that have the highest percentage of people using voice search once a week or more:

*According to WeAreSocial and Hootsuite survey
China 31,9%
India 29%
Nigeria 25,6%
USA 24,7%
U.K. 23,3%
Italy 23,2%
Turkey 21,9%
Spain 21,6%

Thanks to the active development of marketing in social networks, users are looking for relevant information or products there more and more often. According to the aforementioned study, almost half of people turn to social media searches, especially the representatives of generation Z.

CHAPTER 6

Are All Websites Mobile-Friendly?

Is Customizing a Site for Mobile Devices Vital in 2021?

In 2021, 53% of online activity comes from mobile device logins. Computers are still important and account for a large share of activity, at least 47%, but are slowly starting to lose priority. What is also interesting, women spend more time online via phone than men.

According to GWI, 90% of Internet users go online on their phones, but more than 60% of them also use laptops or desktop computers, especially for work-related issues.

More and more technological and convenient smartphones are appearing on the market and helping to use the Internet in a more comfortable way. Therefore, smartphones are the most popular devices to access the Internet creating 54% of web traffic.

Take a look at statistics on the number of mobile or smartphone users around the world:

*According to Statista survey
2015 4,15 B
2016 4,3 B
2017 4,43 B
2018 4,57 B
2019 4,68 B
2020 4,78 B
2021 6,4 B

In some countries, the difference between access to the Internet from a computer and a mobile device is huge, and in some countries, it is just minimal, such as in Western Europe.

To summarize this part, it is worth noting that setting up sites for use on mobile devices is now a must.

Statistics on the Friendliness of the Site to Mobile Devices



To provide up-to-date statistics on sites configured for use on mobile devices is difficult because recently, there have been no published full-fledged studies on this subject. But as of 2018, according to Canonicalized, the percentage of such sites was already about 76%. Thus, we can make the logical inference that this figure has increased even more by 2021.

CHAPTER 7

Top Sites in the World

Based on Alexa data, we come to the following conclusion.

Of course, the most popular site in the world is Google. And it is not surprising at all, because the search for information is most often carried out through this site almost everywhere around the world. But not in its every part.

There are countries for which there are their "favorites" in the form of the social network Vkontakte for Russia and the search engine Baidu for China. But in the global sense, Google still has no competitors.

The second leading global resource is Youtube, which is almost as old as the Internet itself. Youtube boasts at least 2 billion active users per month. It's important to understand that this figure only counts users who have used the personal account login. And how many people watch videos on this resource without logging in to their account - it's hard even to imagine!

Here’s the top 10 list of the most popular websites in the world, according to data provided by the abovementioned source.

*According to Hootsuite survey
The top 10 of the most popular websites in the world
1 Google
2 YouTube
3 TMail.com
4 QQ.com
5 Baidu.com
6 Sohu.com
7 Facebook.com
8 Taobao.com
9 360.cn
10 JD.com

CHAPTER 8

How Many Sites Does Google Index: Thousands, Millions, or Billions?

It is almost impossible to answer this question, even Google itself does not give us exact information on this issue. The difficulty is that Google’s main task is to provide the user with the most relevant and comprehensive information for his/her query, and, therefore, it offers web pages. Any site can be a single-page site, or it can contain several thousand web pages, which makes it difficult to do the math. Google provides information about the number of indexed web pages and even shares information on its page: it is more than 2,24 billion of them.

CHAPTER 9

Leading Google Search Queries

Based on the data provided by Statista, we can give a synopsis of the top 10 queries on Google in 2021

*According to Statista survey
Query Index Value
Google 100
YouTube 88
Facebook 85
You 70
Weather 65
News 48
Whatsapp 43
Translate 42
Amazon 38
Instagram 36

CHAPTER 10

How Does Google Rank Sites?

Simply put, ranking is a set of rules, compliance with which brings a site to the top and raises it above less relevant resources.

Google analyzes the relevance of a web resource according to three basic criteria:

The relevance of the content on the page. It should match the user's query; The site's compliance with the search engine algorithms and the absence of so-called “black optimization tools”; Link ranking (taking into account the number and quality of hits to the site from other web resources).

Of course, these are only basic criteria. By and large, there are more than 200 of them.

CHAPTER 11

Is it Possible to Count the Amount of Information on the Internet?

We've already stipulated at the very beginning of the article and several times describing other aspects, that it's just impossible to provide exact statistics on some issues related to the Internet. That’s because the data changes every second. This is the case again.

Nevertheless, according to Data Age with IDC Global DataSphere , if the trend continues (and we have no reason to doubt it), the total amount of information will reach 175 ZB by 2025, which is an incredible figure.

How Much is 175 ZB?


If the volume of material precious resources can somehow be imagined, it is much more difficult to visualize 1 ZB of information. Is a sextillion bytes or 1 million million million gigabytes a lot?

To imagine its size, it takes about 83 million 12 terabyte hard drives to store 1 ZB. From a single 1 Zettabyte hard drive, you can watch 63 million years of 4K high-resolution video.

To make it even easier to represent 1 ZB, let's translate it to the things we use every day. To get 1 ZB, you would need to take the memory of 34,359,738,368 smartphones with 32 gigabytes of storage capacity. If you put 34.4 billion smartphones (by length) behind each other, you would circle the Earth 181.2 times, or you could circle Jupiter almost 11 times. Now multiply that by 175.

CHAPTER 12

What Types of Websites Are There on the Internet?

There are many kinds of websites on the Internet. The most popular among them are:

  • Business card websites;
  • Corporate informative websites;
  • E- commerce sites;
  • Social platforms;
  • Personal projects;
  • Content project;
  • Promo sites;
  • Forum websites;
  • Blogs.

And this is only a part of the possible variations of websites, in fact, there are more. But most of them belong to one of the types mentioned above.

CHAPTER 13

What Languages Do Sites on the Internet "Speak"?

According to data provided by W3Tech, about 62% of all sites use English as the main language, followed by Russian with a huge gap: 7.3% of sites provide information in Russian. The top three closes the Turkish language with a figure of 3.8%.

Other languages use is given in this diagram:

3.7%

Spanish

3.5%

Persian

2.5%

French

2.0%

German

1.9%

Japanese

1.8%

Vietnamese

1.3%

Chinese

1.2%

Arabic

0.7%

Indonesian

0.7%

Portuguese

0.7%

Italian

0.6%

Ukraian

0.5%

Thai

0.5%

Dutch, Flemish

0.5%

Korean

0.5%

Greek

0.5%

Polish

0.3%

Romanian

0.2%

Czech

0.2%

Swedish

0.2%

Serbian

0.1%

Danish

0.1%

Hungarian

0.1%

Bulgarian






But it should be noted that many sites on the Internet are multilingual. For example, Youtube is a real polyglot among websites. This resource is adapted for 80 different languages and can "understand" 95% of people living on the planet.

The multilingualism of a website is its competitive advantage helping to attract more users to the resource.

CHAPTER 14

Statistics and Important Aspects of Web Hosting and Web Design

Based on WebFX data, we can draw the following conclusions about web hosting and web design:

  • If a page on the Internet loads more than 2 seconds, about 40% of users will leave before it is fully loaded. Moreover, the loading speed of the page has a huge impact on the ranking of the site;
  • More than 45% of sites on the web were created with WordPress;
  • 66% of users will leave a site if it is poorly designed even if it provides relevant information;
  • The site should not only look good but also be user-friendly. 89% of people will go to a competitor if they waste time searching for the needed information for a long time;
  • Since a huge portion of users use mobile devices to access the internet, 74% of people will choose a site that is easy to use not only on a computer;
  • Personalized content attracts up to 35% more users.

CHAPTER 15

What Awaits Us in 2022: Top Internet Trends

Now that you have a comprehensive view of the digital industry today, the question is: What's next?

  • Ending the use of third-party cookies. Google's Chrome browser will stop supporting third-party cookies at the end of 2021, and Safari already blocks them by default. As we know, many advertisers have depended heavily on cookies, and they'll have to change their approach in the near future. A lot of things in programmatic advertising will have to be rebuilt to accommodate the new advertising realities;
  • Flexible working conditions. It seems that in the foreseeable future, "work from home" will remain an integral part of working life for many people, so in the coming months, we should expect to see new online products and services that are designed to help organize remote work, especially in terms of communication and increasing team cohesion;
  • The digital revolution. Products and services involving access to the Internet will continue to influence existing categories of goods and services and provoke the emergence of new ones. However, in 2021-2022, three industries will be particularly interesting to watch: healthcare, finance, and education. Most likely, we will see the takeoff of medicine, the emergence of new online products in the areas of international payments and insurance, and the creation of more effective solutions for online learning, including online professional development.

CHAPTER 16

Bottom Line: How and Whom Can This Internet Statistics Help?

This deep dive into Internet statistics gives hope for a cloudless future for businesses on the Web. Perhaps you are a marketer or programmer, whether you have a successful online store or are just starting a blog, the potential for any project is virtually limitless.

The Internet will continue to evolve. It's time to ride the wave of technology!

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