How Many Websites Are There in the World? [2023 Update]

This article will elaborate in more detail like manner, stats, and figures related to websites, webpages, e-commerce, search engines, programming languages, hackers, and much more.  

Lets Start!

A website is a collection of web pages and other related content identified by a common domain name and published on at least one web server.

We all know google.com, amazon.com, wikipedia.org, and many other popular sites.

Most of you don’t know that these websites are part of the World Wide Web (WWW).

What does that mean?

It means that it’s sites like these that are open to the public that constitutes the World Wide Web.

However, not all websites are worldwide accessible.

Yes, the opposite of public is private.

Therefore, there are private websites too.

The thing with private websites is that you can access them only on a private network (e.g., a company’s internal website for its employees).

(Sources: Wikipedia; techjury.net)

Contents table:

• How many websites are active, and how many are inactive?
• How many new websites are created every hour and day?
• How many registered domains are there to date?
• How many web pages are there?
• What percentages of businesses have websites?
• What percentage of websites are with HTTPS?
• What percentage of websites are hacked?
• How many websites are there in the US?
• Top Five 1 Million Websites by Country
• How many internet users are thereby continent?
• How Many
  • What percentage of websites are WordPress?
  • CMS-built Websites
  • E-commerce sites (eCommerce)
• What percentage of websites are mobile-friendly?
• What is the most popular programming language for building websites?
• The growth rate in the last five years
• Future of websites market
• What percentage of websites on the internet get traffic?
• What percentage of websites are on search engines?
• On average, how many pages do websites have?
• How many websites are there on the Dark Web?
• Conclusion

1. How many websites are active, and how many are inactive?

In accordance with recent stats from 2020, there are only about 200 million active websites and more than 1.5 billion inactive websites on the internet.

2. How many websites are there in the world? How many websites exist?

Finally, some answers!

Research from 2016 shows that the number of websites almost doubled, making its way from 900 million to 1.70 billion.

Meanwhile, as incredibly high the number of websites is, there are still about 1,580,279,247 inactive websites on the internet today, according to Internet Live Stats.

Let’s have a look at the yearly table of the total number of websites on the internet (active):

• January 2019 – 1,518,207,412 (182,185,876)
• January 2018 – 1,805,260,010 (171,648,771)
• January 2017 – 1,800,047,111 (172,353,235)
• January 2016 – 906,616,188 (170,258,872)
• January 2015 – 876,812,666 (177,127,427)
• January 2014 – 861,379,152 (180,067,270)
• January 2013 – 629,939,191 (186,821,503)
• January 2012 – 582,716,657 (182,441,983)
• January 2011 – 273,301,445 (101,838,083)
• January 2010 – 206,741,990 (83,456,669)
• January 2009 – 185,497,213 (71,647,887)
• January 2008 – 155,583,825 (68,274,154)

The total number of websites is confirmed by NetCraft and published in its Web Server Survey in May 2018.
To sum up, even though with almost 2 billion websites at hand, we have less than 400 million active ones.

(Sources: techjury.net; siteefy.com)

3. How many new websites are created every hour and day?

Slightly more than 547,200 new websites are created DAILY on a global level and about more or less 23,000 new websites EVERY HOUR.

Just imagine the flow of information that accumulates in a minute, yet in an hour – worldwide!
How many websites are created every day?

I can’t give you an exact number for the mere reason that while you’re reading this, the numbers are growing.

Keep an open mind; this is just a rough estimation of just how much is happening.

Yet, just as new websites pop up by the minute, web pages/websites are vanishing by the minute too.

(Source: siteefy.com)

4. How many registered domains are there to date?

VeriSign (NASDAQ: VRSN) reported 366.8 million Domain Name Registrations at the end of the 1st Quarter of 2020.

The domain is the address of a website (something like the front door of a house, the entrance), which is called URL (Uniform Resource Locator).

Here is a more visual explanation of a domain address:

5. How many domains are there?

The Top-Level Domains (TLDs):

• the .com and
• the .net

Combine a total of 160.7 million registrations in the Domain Name Base at the end of Q1, 2020.

Most of us think that the only level domains are .com, .net, and .org – news flash guys; there are many more.

Take a further look into other TLDs:

• .cn (China) – over 21 million
• .tk (Tokelau) – 19.9 million
• .de (Germany) – 16.3 million
• .uk (United Kingdom) – 12.1 million
• .info – 6.4 million
• .ru (Russia) – 6.2 million
• .nl (Netherlands) – 5.8 million

(Sources: siteefy.com; businesswire.com)

6. How many web pages are there?

At least 56.5 billion web pages indexed through Google, states a report by the WorldWide Web Size Project.

This number is of no great surprise. Moreover, we expect the total number of web pages to surpass the total number of websites.

If we consider that a single website can include hundreds, if not thousands of individual web pages.
Do me a favor, and you do the counting.

(Source: siteefy.com)

7. What percentages of businesses have websites?

Less than 64% of small businesses have a website, and 58% of small businesses without websites plan to create one in 2019.

Business owners start to knock some sense and realize just how crucial it is to keep up with technology and people’s expectations nowadays.

Less than two-thirds of small businesses have a website, and over 36% of small businesses don’t have a website.
On the other hand, we have 35% of small businesses that think their operation is too small to need a website at all.

(Source: review42)

8. What percentage of websites are with HTTPS?

About 40% in 2016 of websites protected with HTTPS secure encryption leaped to today’s stunning 80%.
Before any further details, let’s first clarify

What does HTTPS stand for?

You must have thought about it at least once or twice in your life.

Here it is, the moment of truth! 🙂

HTTPS or Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure, the very same one is an extension of HTTP, and its role is to secure communication on the internet.

So, in simple words, HTTPS protects our credit/debit card information and makes our online shopping fast, fun, and a SAFE experience.

According to recent stats, over 51.8% of the most visited websites worldwide now actively redirect to HTTPS.

The growth in the number of sites may well be because Google emphasizes higher and better online security protocols.

Either way, I’m happy to hear that more and more of the websites are doing everything they can to protect us (the customers/visitors).

(Sources: news.umich.edu; primekey.com)

9. What percentage of websites are hacked?

The average number of new websites being hacked daily is now 30,000.

These 30,000 sites are usually legitimate small businesses that are unintentionally spreading malware.

Smaller businesses are often a hackers’ target simply because of the lack of strength in their cybersecurity.

Thus, they act like a slightly open door in the middle of the night for a stranger (hacker) to quickly “break in” (hack).

Take a look at some of the loopholes small businesses have:

• Lack of security
• We already mentioned this.
• Naive Employees and Management
• Less trained and more curious staff is easy to underlie a phishing ‘bait’ (e.g., opening an email with harmful content disguised in a simple ad or alike).
• Confidential information
• Hack attacks aren’t a random choice.
• They use the lack of security with small businesses to steal private information (for identity thefts or other frauds).
• Unfortunately, almost all software can be hacked one way or another.

Let’s dig deeper into website hacking stats and facts:

• A hack attack occurs every 39 seconds on average on the web.
• Non-secure usernames and passwords are easy targets (unaware hacker helpers).
• Hackers steal 75 records EVERY SECOND.
• To 73% of the Black Hat hackers, the traditional Firewall and Antivirus Security is irrelevant and obsolete (that’s scary).

As disturbing as these facts maybe, they’re also quite real, and they happen (clearly) more often than what we think they do.

(Sources: webarxsecurity.com; kaspersky.com; hg.org)

Number of Websites by country

10. How many websites are there in the US?

A Survey of the 1 million most-visited websites the US hosts shows envying 43% of the websites on the internet.
With the above figures in hand, we can clearly say that the US represents 8.2% of the whole online population.

One of the problems that many can’t come to an exact number of websites in the US is how websites correlate and interact (the US or non-US).

Read through these criteria that determine the ‘source’ of a website. Therefore, a website can be:

• hosted in the USA,
• doing business in the USA,
• or managed from the USA.

I wasn’t able to figure out an exact number of websites in the US, but from my overall research through various platforms, I came to a rough number of 505,000,000 hosts in the USA.

This number was most definitely much higher now in 2020.

All in all, I feel confident enough to state that there are at least 505,000,000 websites somehow linked to the US.

(Source: quora.com)

Top 1 Million Websites by Country

11. Google.com holds the No.1 position, with an estimation of 2.5 trillion searches per year.

In this section, I won’t go much into words but rather into numbers.

Let’s take a dive!

Google.com has:

• 1,306,192 total sites linking in,
• 0.40% traffic from search,
• 16.80 daily page views per visitor
• and 15:31 (average time in minutes and seconds) daily time on site by users.

Look at the percentage of visitors to Google.com (by country):

Country	Visitors percentage
The USA	27%
India	8.7%
Japan	4.6%
China	3.6%
Brazil	2.8%

12. How many internet users are thereby continent?

13. Have you ever asked yourself how big the internet is?

So, here we are in 2020, with more than 20 million eCommerce sites.

Read that sentence again. Tell me, how do you feel about it? Do you know what that means?

From my point of view, the shopping that we knew before changed for good.

I see fewer people going out and trying on clothes. On the contrary, I see people ordering their kids’ sneakers online (measuring their foot width and length).

No one’s trying to take a selfie with an expo phone in a saloon (they look up specs and youtube reviews now).

It may sound sad, but it isn’t really.

In relation to this, let’s make a list of pros and cons and see the effect of e-commerce shopping.

PROs

• Convenient – 24/7 hours available.
• Wide selection – online stores offer a wide range of products. You can find exclusive products and deals that can’t be found anywhere near you.

CONs

• Restricted Customer Service – some products need a demonstration, and you can’t simply ask an employee to show you how something works.

Remember? You are buying from your PC.

• You can’t have your product the same day you buy it – this is the biggest discomfort when online shopping.
  • Aliexpress has you waiting for 2-3 months before being able to hold what you bought.
  • Amazon, on the other side, offers same-day delivery on certain products (for select countries).

Now let’s move on to a few of the groundbreaking general e-commerce statistics:

• 95% of all retail sales will be conducted through e-commerce sites by 2040.
• By 2023 India is to rank 1st in e-commerce growth in the retail industry.
• E-commerce sites in China will generate more than $4 trillion in revenue by 2023.
• Over 80% of all goods on eBay are brand new.
• 57% of worldwide online shoppers buy from retailers who are overseas.
• The e-commerce business is growing 23% annually.

Wow! Impressive numbers!

It makes me want to sit down and open an online shop of my own 🙂

Don’t you?

(Source: kommandotech.com; investopedia.com; wpforms.com)

What percentage of websites are mobile-friendly?

Next to 24% of the Top 1 Million Most Popular Websites in the world are not mobile-friendly.
Well, that’s not very nice.

17. What’s a mobile-friendly site for you?

For me

• That’s a site that loads pretty fast.
• It offers click buttons that the tip of my finger can click on (instead of tapping over and over on my phone screen).
• The site that’s designed to serve as a mobile version (not a desktop version on my phone – it’s ridiculous).
• Oh, and yes, a site that doesn’t crash halfway through (especially when paying for my order).

I’m pretty sure that all this is on your checklist for mobile-friendly sites too.

The above said concludes that a mobile-friendly website is essential, especially when it shrinks down to be small enough to display on a mobile device.

However, people often confuse responsiveness with friendliness.

I’m not surprised because it’s a fine-drawn line between a responsive and a friendly site.

Canonicalized, conducted an evaluation via Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test to check Alexa’s Top 1 Million Websites on the web, and this was the final results:

• 76.17% of the websites passed and
• the remaining 23.83% failed the test.

18. What’s a ‘False Negative’?

The best way to explain this is aliexpress.com. Example.

Google’s mobile-friendly test check-marked aliexpress.com as a mobile unfriendly page.

Shocked? I am too.

I mean: come on! This is one of the most mobile concentrated sites in the world. It has to be some kind of mistake.

It turns out after a more thorough search that they have a separate mobile site that goes by m.aliexpress.com.

Google isn’t a psychic.

It can happen to anyone, and this time it was Google that made a mistake because of the ‘m’ tag in front.

According to Google’s statement, a website should begin with a ‘www.’

(Source: canonicalized.com)

19. What is the most popular programming language for building websites?

If we consider all well-known rankings and industry trends, then JavaScript is the No.1 programming language in the world.

To be able to speak fluently 1-2 foreign languages it’s a blessing. However, to be able to “speak” any programming language is even greater a blessing nowadays.

Why?

With about 600 programming languages in the world, its demand fluctuates every year. Still, program language savvy people are needed worldwide no matter what.

Let’s talk statistics.

Here are Statista’s top 5 most widely utilized programming languages among developers worldwide (2020):

I’d like to share an important fact with you.

JavaScript is the most utilized programming language worldwide among the most experienced in their field, but it’s not the sweetheart of programming languages.

Python is the No.1 most favorite and widely used programming language among learners.

This is because its design is beginner-friendly and provides simple variables and functions which can easily be mastered by many.

(Source: Statista)

Websites Numbers and Usage Growth Trends

20. The growth rate in the last five years

With a fast rate of more than 11 users per second (or 1 million new users each day), internet users now make up 57% of the global population.

Mosaic was the first internet browser. This browser was launched back in 1993, and it’s considered the PIONEER of making the internet easily accessible to the general public.

The internet and technology have come a long way from 1993 till today.

The changes in technology are clear to all of us, but there are also many differences in statistics too.

Over the last 27 years, the internet has grown in use and efficacy.

Let’s take the numbers of internet users (then and now), for example.

The list was really long, so I cut it short. Take a look at the stats from the last five years, from June 2016-June to, 2020.

Here are some stats elaborated by Live Internet Stats:

Date (June)                 Number of Users                World Population (%)

June 2020                    4,833 million                                 62%

June 2019                    4,536 million                                 58.8%

June 2018                    4,208 million                                 55.6%

June 2017                    3,885 million                                 51.7%

June 2016                    3,631 million                                49.55%

If you take a closer look at this list, you can see a clear sign of an increase with each passing year.

By the look of things, these are growing numbers, and we should expect a bigger rate of increase in the years to come.

(Source: internetworldstats.com)

Future of websites market

Digital and online marketing see a bunch of changes every year as technology evolves by the minute.

Online marketing trends ‘suffer’ an immense impact by mobile phones and digital personal assistants.

I feel strong enough to state that this is a new era, but I feel like an even newer one is coming onto us.

21. What can we expect? What’s the new future novelty?

Robots, automatization, machines taking over human labor?

I’m not a fortune teller but by the look of things. I’d say that’s already happening, slowly but surely creeping into every corner of all industries.

In the meantime, let’s shed some light on some of the ongoing futuristic things at the moment.

Check out some of the ongoing and upcoming ‘futuristic’ stuff:

• Generation Z – this is the generation born between 1997 and 2012 – 2015.
  I’m eager to see what their young brains have in store for us from a digital and tech-wise perspective.
• Personalization – getting things more personalized will bring more customers.
  People get frustrated when a huge pile of things doesn’t relate in any way to their personal taste.
  Some companies have already started to apply personalization, and they see a reward on their side in the rise of sales of at least 20%.
• Diversification – if ‘personalization’ is in play, then diversification also enters the gates of ‘future.’
  The same email won’t work for all anymore. This requires categorizing things and goods based on:
  – Functionality
  – Age
  – Gender
  – Practicality
  – even races for that fact.
• Mobile shopping – Pinterest is taking over matters into its own hands.
• Stories – WhatsApp and Instagram Stories are taking over control by pushing off Snapchat aside big time.
• Customer Service and Artificial Intelligence (AI) – next to e-commerce, customer service is shifting into social.
• Personal Assistants (PAs) – such as the gigantic Amazon Echo or Google Home.
• Virtual Reality (VR) – simulated experience similar or different from the actual reality.
• Augmented Reality (AR) – an interactive experience of a real-world environment where the objects from the real world are magnified by computer-generated perceptual information.

My overall opinion on all the above is that as much as new and futuristic stuff the digital world holds for us, the proven and established methods are still here to stay.

Like content marketing for example.

Its methods and formulas may be old-fashioned or simple, but they work and get excellent results.

Tech stuff like ‘content marketing isn’t gonna disappear. They just need a refreshing touch here and there.

Anyways, I’m looking forward to seeing what the tech future has in store for us 🙂

(Sources: wsoaonline.com; neilpatel.com/blog)

22. What percentage of websites are useful?

What percentage of websites on the internet get traffic?

Instead of jumping straight to figures and answers, just stop and think how many seconds/minutes you need to decide whether you like/dislike a site?

I need 1-5 seconds.

On the other hand, Sweor users need approximately 0.05 seconds to form a definite opinion on whether they like or dislike a site.

“Don’t judge a book by its cover” doesn’t work for websites too.

Time is money, and no one has the “luxury” to read through an entire website, just so at the end to decide that it’s not for them.

I feel that we warmed up a little bit, so now we can go back to our topic:

23. What percentage of websites on the internet get traffic?

The global percentage of mobile traffic from the total internet web traffic in February 2019 was 47.96%.

While, as of October 2020, the mobile web traffic holds a firm 48.62%.

The internet traffic will grow 3.2-fold from 2016 to 2021. This is an estimated annual growth rate of 26%.

Meanwhile, busy hour internet traffic will grow 4.6-fold from 2016 to 2021. That’s a compound annual growth rate of 35%.

Top 10 websites with most visits (monthly traffic):

(Source: ahrefs.com/blog; sweor.com)

24. What percentage of websites are on search engines?

Recent studies show that organic search traffic accounts for 73% of all traffic to Business Services Sites.

That’s well over a 20% jump from the 51% estimating organic search across all sites.

This rise in percentage comes as no surprise.

Why is it so?

Because in an era as digitized as ours, search engines are becoming more and more powerful by the day and a crucial part of our daily lives, it’s unavoidable.

With no further delay, let us hop over to the main question:

25. What are the top leading search engines worldwide?

Check out the top 6 search engine worldwide leaders as of October 2020:

(Source: Statista; gs.statcounter.com)

26. On average, how many pages do websites have?

The average website has only 5% of visitors looking at more than three pages.

How many pages does a website have?

A normal standalone website usually consists of:

• Homepage
• Services
• About Us
• Contact Us.

However, the criteria vary depending on the owner’s needs and purposes.
Other factors may be:

• Category
• Industry
• Location, etc.

We can all agree that the question itself is quite broad to give a straight answer.

(Source: quora.com)

How many websites are there on the Dark Web?

Tell me, what’s the first thing that comes to your mind when you hear ‘Dark Web’?
Smuggling, drugs, illegal sale of human organs?

Aha, yes. I know you’re reading and saying: yes, yes, yes.

Stick around and find out more.

But first, let’s find out.

27. What is the Dark Web?

Of course, the Dark Web is part of the internet. It represents the part of the internet that is ‘invisible to the search engines.

Can you access it?

Hmm. I can’t say ‘yes’ nor ‘no.’

Instead, I’ll go ahead and answer that some of you may, but most can’t.

This part of the internet can be accessed only with highly specific software and configurations or to have the authorization to do so.

28. Who uses the Dark Web?

Thousands of people want to keep their web activities secret (and the reason isn’t because of playing too much Candy Crush on Facebook).

29. Who created the Dark Web?

You’ll be surprised to hear this one.

Here it goes, nothing: The US GOVERNMENT!

The Dark Web is a creation of the USA government, believe it or not.

Hold your horses.

Stay with me and read through it.

The main purpose of the Dark Web-primarily was to allow spies to interchange data anonymously.

This is nothing new, it dates back to the 90s. The US military researchers invented a special technology, called ‘Tor’ (The Onion Router).

The name comes because of its strategy: it encrypts and hides websites layer by layer (just like the layers of an onion).

Most of those websites are also hosted on the .onion domain.

Let me get back at the top of this section and confirm your suspicions, before further. Yes, you can buy all that and more:

• Buy and sell drugs
• Guns
• Counterfeit money
• Buy credit card numbers
• Hacked Netflix accounts and the list goes on.

The Dark Web is a golden market for all sorts of buying and selling drugs

Let’s not ‘get lost’ in this subject, and let’s go back to our first question.

30. How many websites are there on the Dark Web?

Speculation is that The Dark Web occupies around 5% of the total internet on the surface, BUT that’s because it’s only a subset of the Deep Web.

Dark Web stats in 2020 reveal a horrifying 48% of the internet in their possession.

(Sources: csoonline.com; cyberscoop.com; techjury.net/blog; the-sun.com; wikipedia.com)

Conclusion

We always knew that the internet is a limitless space, but seeing these figures and stats, it’s mind-blowing!

We learned that even with 200 million active websites, there are a huge number of inactive sites (1.5 billion).

We have new websites popping up like mushrooms every day (even better, every hour) to our comfort.

Now we know what Domains, CMS, e-commerce, HTTPS are and what’s their purpose.

And hey, who knew that JavaScript even though the most widely used programming language worldwide, isn’t the most popular too? Way to go, Python!

Small businesses are starting to think straight (at least some of them) and start to integrate more in the social media boundless market.

Ah, don’t forget the hackers. As for them, there is no such thing as a good firewall or antivirus that can’t be hacked.

I elaborate quite the number of stats in this article, and I went through a good amount of what’s out there on the internet: from active and inactive sites to top search engines, e-commerce stats, mobile-friendly websites, to the mean and mysterious Dark Web.

I really hope there was something for everyone in this article.