Statistics
How Many Websites Are There Around the World? [2022]
Dmytro Tsybuliak
LinkedInJune 11, 2022
Dmytro Tsybuliak
LinkedInJune 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in it is slowly becoming out-of-date.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.
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.
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.
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.
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 |
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).
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.
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.
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.
Here are some statistics about the current state of cybersecurity:
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.
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:
These statistics include all types of TLDs: ccTLDs; gTLDs.
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 |
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% |
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% |
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% |
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% |
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.
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% |
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:
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
The top 10 of the most popular websites in the world | |
---|---|
1 | |
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 |
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.
Based on the data provided by Statista, we can give a synopsis of the top 10 queries on Google in 2021
Query | Index Value |
---|---|
100 | |
YouTube | 88 |
85 | |
You | 70 |
Weather | 65 |
News | 48 |
43 | |
Translate | 42 |
Amazon | 38 |
36 |
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.
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.
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.
There are many kinds of websites on the Internet. The most popular among them are:
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.
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.
Based on WebFX data, we can draw the following conclusions about web hosting and web design:
Now that you have a comprehensive view of the digital industry today, the question is: What's next?
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!
Sources