The precise number of websites worldwide is difficult to pinpoint because thousands of new websites are created within the short span of just one single minute, while many others are simultaneously deleted. But this is not to say it is impossible to estimate the number of websites worldwide. Let’s dive in.
Key findings
- There are over 1 billion websites in the world today.
- The number of active websites today is 2,290% more than during the dotcom mania in 2000.
- Approximately 3,992,222 websites are created every day, 2,772 websites are created every minute, and 46 websites are created every second.
- The number of ecommerce websites worldwide currently stands at 26.5 million.
- The .com TLD (top level domain) is the most common domain extension.
- Google, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter (X), and Instagram are the most popular websites worldwide.
How many websites are there in the world?
One estimate puts the total number of websites in existence at 1,106,671,903 as of June 2023 [1].
Surprisingly, that’s nearly 40% fewer websites today than in February 2018, when the number of sites hit an all-time high of 1,839,596,056 [1].
How many of the sites are active?
Interestingly, while the total number of websites worldwide has nosedived since 2018, the number of active sites has been growing steadily. In fact, active sites touched a new record peak in 2023 (202,900,724 websites as of January 2023). The number is slightly down to 201,898,446 as of June 2023, still 2,290% more than during the dotcom mania in 2000 [1].
How many websites are created every day, every minute and every second?
Since we know that 359.3 million domain name registrations across all top-level domains (TLDs) were completed in the third quarter of 2023, we can use this information to make a rough estimate [2]. To achieve this goal, we need to make some assumptions:
- First, we assume that the number of domain name registrations is equal to the number of websites created. In reality, there will be some deviation here, as some domains may not have active websites, or some websites may use subdomains or free hosting services.
- Second, we assume that the number of websites created is evenly distributed throughout the quarter, which is not going to happen in reality, due to seasonal and daily fluctuations in website creation.
- Third, we assume that the third quarter of 2023 has 90 days, an average value for a quarter. However, depending on the calendar year, the exact number might vary.
Therefore, based on these assumptions, we can estimate that in the second quarter of 2023 there were 3,992,222 websites created every day, 2,772 websites created every minute, and 46 websites created every second.
How many websites are deleted every day?
As new sites come up, many others cease to exist. For example, we saw that there were 1,106,671,903 sites as of June 2023 against 1,109,384,426 in the previous month.
Simply put, over 2.7 million websites were lost between May and June 2023. In average daily terms, about 90,417 sites were deleted every day in that period.
Number of websites by type
How do the numbers of the different categories of websites compare?
There are no possible means to estimate the exact number of websites in each category. However, there are authoritative estimates of the number of sites in certain categories, such as ecommerce and pornographic sites. One estimate reveals that, as of the time of this writing, the number of ecommerce websites worldwide stands at 26.5 million [3]. This number has increased exponentially (by 188%) since 2019.
Another estimate found that at least 4% of all websites in the world in 2019 were pornographic [4]. That’s a considerable amount of adult content, considering there were about 1.5 billion websites globally at the time.
Number of websites by TLD
TLD, or top-level domain, is the rightmost segment of a domain name, located after the last dot. For example, in the domain name www.abc.com, the TLD is ‘.com’.
What are the most common TLDs used for websites?
The vast majority of websites worldwide use the .com TLD. As of September 30, 2023, approximately 160.8 million domain names were registered with a .com TLD [2]. Second place was .cn (20.3 million domain names), and in third place was .de (17.6 million domain names).
Interestingly, seven of the top 10 largest TLDs by number of registered websites are country-code top-level domains (ccTLDs). ccTLDs are two-letter domain extensions assigned to specific countries or territories. For example, .nl is assigned to the Netherlands.
What is the composition of TLDs in newly registered websites?
Of the 354 million new domain names registered between January and March 2023, 326.7 million (92.3%) were new generic TLDs (ngTLDs) [5]. This means the overwhelming majority of new websites have TLDs such as .xyz, .online, .top, etc.
Interestingly, most new domain names (websites) registered in June 2023 using the ngTLDs are registered with the .xyz TLD (12.2%) [5]. These are followed by .online (8.7%) and .top (7.6%).
Market share of registrars for websites that use ngTLDs
GoDaddy.com, LLC (GoDaddy Group) is the largest registrar of ngTLDs by market share (14.60%) as of November 25, 2023, only about half a percentage point more than the next big player, NameCheap, Inc. (14.12%). Other key players in this niche include NameSilo, LLC (5.49%), Alibaba Cloud Computing Ltd. (4.72%), and GMO Internet Group, Inc. (4.72%) [5].
Which country code TLD (ccTLD) has the most websites?
By now, you can guess which ccTLD has the most websites because, as seen earlier, seven out of 10 largest TLDs by number of reported domain names were ccTLDs. If you can’t guess, here is the information: outside of .com (which is not a ccTLD), most websites worldwide are registered in a domain name that includes China’s country (cn) – the .cn extension has 20.3 million reported domain names. It is followed by Germany’s .de (17.6 million), the United Kingdom’s .uk (10.9 million), and the Netherlands’ .nl (6.3 million) [2].
Which languages are most commonly used on websites?
English is the lingua franca of web content; the fact that 58.8% of all websites in the world are in English provides sufficient evidence. Russian language websites come in an overwhelmingly distant second (5.3%), then Spanish (4.3%), followed by French and German (3.7% each), and Japanese (3%) [6].
It is not by accident that English dominates other languages this way. In fact, English is the most spoken language in the world, with about 18.5% of the global population communicating in the language, followed by Mandarin Chinese (14.5%), Hindi (7.7%), and Spanish (7.1%) [7].
What Are the Most Visited Websites in the World?
Several website traffic analytics tools rank the most visited websites in the world, and interestingly, the picture is the same for the five most popular websites in the world by traffic.
SimilarWeb and Semrush all rank Google, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram among the most popular websites worldwide [8][9].
However, this ranking begins to vary from this point onwards. Also, unlike the top five, the sixth through tenth positions also tend to be knocked off the list from month-to-month (with some coming back in other months). Nevertheless, the rankings provide a clear picture of the most visited websites in the world.