Website Statistics and Facts: A 2020 Study

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It’s easy to get whiplash from how fast the Internet changes.

Just think: Merely 8.2% of US households owned a computer in 1984. Now, five billion people across the world own a mobile device. In just three decades, we went from almost nobody owning a computer to nearly the entire world being connected via the Internet. That’s mind-boggling.

With how quickly and often the Internet changes, it’s more important than ever for bloggers, website managers, and digital marketers to keep up. Doing so gives you crucial context for your digital strategies and goals.

We want to help.

Below are more than 100 of the most important statistics and facts about the Internet. Use them to help guide your digital marketing efforts this year.

What we’ll cover

General Internet Statistics and Facts

These numbers and takeaways are high-level overviews of the Internet and websites as a whole.

More people are using the Internet than ever before

When it comes to users, Asia wins big…and by a lot

Internet usage grows every day (but a lot of it comes from robots)

Mobile Usage Statistics and Facts

When it comes to Internet usage, mobile is king. That’s why it’s so important that digital marketers and website managers optimize for mobile. Below are a few numbers and stats you should keep in mind to help guide your decisions:

Smartphones are more popular than ever (and water is wet!)

  • 3.5 billion people all over the world use smartphones. That number is anticipated to jump to 3.8 billion by the end of 2021.
  • For comparison, 2.5 billion people used smartphones in 2016 – just a few years ago!
  • Americans tend to use mobile devices more often than they watch TV (see graph below).

Source: eMarketer

  • The average US adult spends 2 hours and 55 minutes on their smartphones every single day. That amounts to more than 44 days per year browsing their smartphones.
  • People of all income and social strata use smartphones for their needs. According to a Pew study, “smartphone ownership exhibits greater variation [than cellphone usage] based on age, household income, and educational attainment.” (see chart below)

People use mobile devices to do the majority of their web browsing

Source: Hootsuite

Mobile users love to shop (and they like different ways to do it)

  • Shopping is increasingly becoming omni-channel. 82% of smartphone users look up products they’re interested in on their phones before they make an in-store purchase.
  • 67% of mobile users in Australia say they use mobile devices for “digital window shopping.” 77% of those users end up making impulse purchases. That’s a window that allows you to capitalize on your users window shopping experience.
  • 2/3 of Internet users use mobile apps to shop
  • 66% of all ecommerce shopping is done on mobile devices

Optimize your site for mobile, and do it yesterday

Blogging Statistics and Facts

Blogging is one of the best ways you can draw in traffic to your website and business. Make sure you’re prepared to do it the right way with these facts and numbers:

People still love to read (and write) blogs

Blogs are still a great way to gain leads

  • Brands that have blogs produce 67% more leads than those that don’t have blogs.

  • 59% of B2B marketers believe that blogs are their most valuable marketing channel.
  • 60% of users are inspired to purchase or seek out a product after they view content about it.
  • 70% of people would rather learn about a brand or product through an article than a traditional advertisement.
  • Content marketing (using content like blog posts to promote your brand and products) produces three times more leads than traditional advertising.

Aim for longer blog posts

Source

  • HubSpot also did an analysis of nearly 6,200 articles and discovered that articles with more than 2,000 words typically got more backlinks (important for SEO) and social shares.

Source: HubSpot

Source: HubSpot

  • Heck, even QuickSprout (i.e. the very website you’re on) shows this. Our blog posts longer than 1,500 words tends to get 68% more tweets and 22% more likes than shorter ones.

Ecommerce Statistics and Facts

To create (and maintain) a good ecommerce website, you’ll need to keep up with the trends and data that reflect your users’ purchasing decisions. Here are a few that might help:

Business is booming…online

  • Retail ecommerce sales are expected to grow to $4.9 trillion by the end of 2021 (yes, that’s trillion with a T). As a comparison, total sales were “just” $1.33 trillion in 2014.
  • The global pandemic accelerated a shift away from physical retail shopping by about five years.
  • Because of that, in-person department stores are expected to decline by 60% over all of 2020. Meanwhile ecommerce is projected to grow by almost 20%.
  • In a Q2 2020 report, the U.S. Census Bureau found that retail ecommerce sales hit $211.5 billion in the United States alone. That’s up from 11.8% in Q1 2020.

It’s Amazon’s world and we’re all living in it

  • Even before the pandemic, Amazon was dominating the global retail market. In 2018, they accounted for nearly half (49.1% of all retail ecommerce spending) and 5% of all retail sales.
  • During the most recent Amazon Prime Day, the company netted $10.4 billion in sales. That blew the doors off of 2019’s Prime Day by 45.2%.
  • Bezo’s company has also seen web traffic explode as the pandemic shut down retail businesses and states enforced lockdown measures to combat COVID-19. For example, their site traffic was up 28.1% in July 2020 compared with February 2020. It’s up 8.7% year-over-year.

Source: DigitalCommerce360

Optimize your ecommerce site—or die! (okay, that’s only a little dramatic)

Source: Statista

Web Hosting and CMS Statistics and Facts

Your web host and CMS are the bedrock of your website and, therefore, your business. Here is the data to help you out:

There are a lot of websites, but most aren’t doing anything

  • There are more than 1.8 billion websites online today. That number grows literally by the second.
  • However, about 75% of all websites online aren’t actually doing anything. Rather, they’re parked domains.
  • Total global revenue from web hosting is expected to clear roughly $66 million in the year 2021.
  • By 2023, it’s expected to reach a market valuation of $76.2 billion. That means that there’s a lot of money to be made in web hosting now and in the very near future.

WordPress is the most popular content management system (CMS) by far

The United States dominates the web hosting industry

  • The 3 most popular web hosting providers are GoDaddy, Cloudflare Hosting, and Google. All of them are US-based corporations.
  • 40.5% of all websites are located in web hosts based in the United States. That’s around 107.62 million domains – much more than any other country in the world.
  • The second country (Germany) doesn’t even come close with 7.9 million. They help host a mere 9.6% of the websites in the world.
  • Here are the top three languages used on the Internet:
    • English: 60.3%
    • Russian: 8.6%
    • Spanish: 4%
  • If you want to reach a wider audience then, you definitely need to make sure that your website includes an option to translate it into English.

Social Media Statistics and Facts

Social media is more popular and powerful than ever. Make sure that your brand knows the right moves to make with these facts and numbers:

Mostly everyone is on social media

Source: Hootsuite

  • Here’s the breakdown of social media usage in the United States by age:
    • 90% of adults age 18-29 use at least one social media site
    • 82% of adults age 30-49 use at least one social media site
    • 69% of adults age 50-64 use at least one social media site
    • 40% of adults age 65 or older use at least one social media site

Source: Pew

  • When it comes to gender (Pew conducted it by binary), women tend to use at least one social media site more than men with 78% of U.S. women on the site compared to 65% of U.S. men.
  • Here is a breakdown of social media use by income:
    • 78% of U.S. adults who use at least one social media site make $75,000+ a year
    • 83% of U.S. adults who use at least one social media site make $50,000-$74,999 a year
    • 70% of U.S. adults who use at least one social media site make $30,000-$49,999 a year
    • 68% of U.S. adults who use at least one social media site make less than $30,000 a year

Source: Pew

We spend a TON of time on social media

It’s Facebook’s world and we’re all living in it.

Most popular social networks worldwide as of October 2020 (in millions)

Source: Statista

  • If you’re a B2B company, though, it’s no question that you should be on LinkedIn. In fact, 97% of B2B marketers leverage the site for content marketing.
  • This is all despite the fact that LinkedIn has a user base of 590 million.
  • However, Facebook is responsible for a big 60% of all ecommerce referrals. That means if you’re running an online store, you definitely want to make sure your Facebook game is strong.

SEO Statistics and Facts

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a fantastic way to build an organic traffic engine and increase your brand’s awareness. Here are a few numbers and facts to keep in mind when you’re doing so:

It’s Google’s world and we’re all living in it.

  • Google continues to be the number one search engine in the entire world—and it’s not even close. As of 2020, they maintain roughly 86% – 90% of all search engine market share.
  • The next most popular search engine is Bing which only receives around 6% of total market share.
  • Google processes roughly 1.2 trillion searchers per year. That amounts to more than 3.5 billion searches per day!
  • Fun fact: In 2006, Google received its own definition in the Merriam-Webster Dictionary. They joined the likes of Kleenex, Xerox, and Chapstick to have their brand name become the generic word for their product.
  • Second fun fact: It used to take Google an entire month to crawl and index 50 million web pages in 1999. By 2012, it only took one minute.
  • According to Google, they index hundreds of billions of webpages and is more than 100,000,000 gigabytes in size. Crazy!

Worldwide desktop market share of search engines

Source: Statista

If you’re not first (page), you’re last.

Source: Search Engine Journal

Domains Statistics and Facts

A good domain name is memorable and reflective of your brand. Domains are also a booming industry you can take advantage of. Here are the numbers and facts you should know to get started:

All the good domains are taken–but people still register domains by the millions.

  • The first domain name ever registered was Symbolics.com—a now defunct computer manufacturer based in Massachusetts that registered the domain on March 15, 1985.
  • Since then, the number of registered domain names have exploded. In fact, there are more than 359 million domains registered as of Q3 2019.
  • This means if you’re looking for .com domain names using common words and phrases, you’re going to be out of luck. They’re likely already taken!
  • The most popular top-level domain names are .coms. In fact, there are currently more than 137 million .com domain names out there.

Domain names can go for a lot of money

  • About 1/3 or these .com domain names are unused. They are likely owned by someone who wants to sell them to prospective buyers.
  • The highest-selling domain name recorded was Cars.com, which sold for an eye-popping $872 million.
  • Sales of domain names is a booming industry. It currently has a market size of $6 billion.
  • The top domain registrar is GoDaddy, which controls about 24% of the market share.
  • Behind GoDaddy in second place is NameCheap, which controls just 8% of the market share.

Conclusion

There you have it! More than 100 website statistics and facts to help guide your decision making process this year.

With all this said, it’s important to remember a crucial tenet: The map is not the territory.

That means that, as helpful as these numbers and pieces of data are, it’s not going to give you a full picture and understanding of reality. It’s also not going to give you a good idea of what is necessarily best for your brand and business.

To understand those details, well…you’re just going to have to do the work and dig into the numbers yourself. No matter what though, we’ll be here to help you out every step of the way.


Source: quicksprout

Website Statistics and Facts: A 2020 Study