As spring rolled in, we prepared a fresh new batch of reports looking at February 2021 and the analysis of the most popular websites in the world – Global website analysis edition. In this report, you have the most successful websites on a global scale, and how they perform every month. We are talking about the best of .com, .net, .tv, and any other top-level domain you could think of.
One of the main reasons for a company to look at the global market and not only their local one is digitalization. In today’s world, our official borders do not limit our reach anymore. Even more so, users find a way to reach companies, even though said companies had no plans of internationalization.
This, as you have already guessed, means more competition, and things are only getting more complex from here on end. But, to help you leverage that competition, examined the average website scores per sector and the average loading time of each industry within the global market, recorded in February 2021.
On top of that, we also looked into a very important factor, is the global market reaching its potential by targeting mobile users as well or are they missing out? The report generated by our web analysis tool will answer that question and more, as we broke down the results giving you the top insights and the full list!
Read on and find out, and don’t forget that every month we will refresh our data and our Global websites review results to keep you on top of your competition at all times.
Key take-aways in February
Top 3 Global Websites
This months’ Global Websites Review has seen some shifts. For one, Zalando, the first contender for the past 2 months has finally been “dethroned” in favor of DuckDuck Go.
DuckDuckGo, an alternative search engine focused on privacy and data security has been at our tops before. But in February, it took first place with an outstanding score of 85 and an impressive loading speed of 0.2s.
Shopify maintained their second place, after scoring the same score of 85 as last month’s results, however, there is an improvement in their speed. While last month they took the second spot with a 0.36s speed, this month they recorded an average of 0.26s, making them only 0.06s slower than the first place. What a race!
Finally, last month’s third place went to History, a tv-guide for The HISTORY Channel and HISTORY2 but this month, it has been pushed down the line by wikiHow, a website focused on how-to guides for the internet. wikiHow scored 83 on our analysis tool and registered a speed of 0.21s.
If there is anything we should take from this new top-3 ranking is their speeds. And what incredible speeds those are. Neither contender has gone past 0.3s, which makes them hard to beat. But considering every month we see different names on this shortlist, there is still hope for the rest of us.
As we always say, optimization is an ongoing process and your website has the potential to move up in rank each month.
Top 3 Sectors
In the top 3 sectors segment for February, we see Apparel taking the lead once again with an average score of 77, one point lower than last month. Moreover, the overall score in this sector is not the only factor that is slightly changed. The average speed is also higher, 0.33s compared to the 0.29s average recorded in January.
In second place we have Motor Vehicles and Parts, with a score of 74, at a tie with Transportation. But again, Page speed determined the winner as Motors Vehicles and Parts recorded an average of 0.36s compared to last months’ results of 0.29s.
As for our third place, Transportation keeps the bronze with the same score as last month of 74 points but we see a huge improvement in this sectors’ average speed which went down from 0.7s in January to only 0.46s in February. Not enough to get it on the second place, but still a huge achievement.
What is interesting to note, these three sectors have won the month’s pagent based on their score, but they were not all the best in every category. More specifically, there ose one sector that faired better when it comes to average speeds, and that is the Food, Beverages, Tobacco & Drug stores sector, which recorded an avearge of 0.22s.
On the Mobile Compatibility map, however, our three winners were not near the best, even though their average scores were pretty good, reaching a matched 80% each. In this segment, in fact, the best performes would be again the Food, Beverages, Tobacco & Drug stores sector, with 86.67%, followed by Hotels, Restaurants & Leisure with 85% and Retailing with 81.82%.
Once more, what we can take from this is that mobile
Top 3 Insights in Global Websites Review
It’s always important to know who are the top players in each market and, especially if you are thinking of starting a new business, it is important to know all you can about the sector you will start in. But, we are talking about top Global websites which means that, as a given, the threshold is rather high.
If you are working on improving your online performance, or are simply planning to start a new website, webshop, or blog, these numbers might seem scary.
However, rest assured, things are not as bad as they might seem. In fact, you might be surprised.
1. The Global websites review reveals an average website score of 70.08 – slighly lower than last month, and easily manageable!
Reaching a site score of 85 is an incredible, undeniable achievement we should all strive for. But reaching that goal is a journey that many have yet to achieve, as we can see from the average overall website score this month of 70.08. More importantly, we alse should note that this is a decrease from last month, which shows the importancy of constant optimisation.
In other words, when it comes to calculating the average score of these websites we have to take into consideration a plethora of factors, such as the complexity of each website, the page size, how well the HTML to text ratio is optimized, mobile compatibility, and mobile-friendliness, and so on.
Whish is why we strongly believe that a website that is well taken care of, can easily reach the 85 top score and surpass it! But what about speed?
2. Loading times are slighlty lower this month – the average loading time Globally is 0.92s compared to 0.90 in January
Well, when it comes to loading speeds, our Global Websites Review uncovered an average loading time of 0.92s, still hitting the high limit of 1s suggested by Google for mobile websites but is a slight change from the last month’s 0.90s.
What might be interesting to note here is that, while average scores by sectors are very close together, keeping the results between 60 and 80, the load speed by sector varies quite a lot. However, what is even more intriguing is that Technology, a sector where most of us would expect to see in the top performers, is actually lagging behind. And with quite a margin.
In fact, with a score 69.28, Technology is once more in the bottom three alongside with Hotels, Restaurants & Leisure, which scored 67.4 and the continuous last place holder Retailing with 66.05 points.
3. The Global Websites Review shows an average Mobile Compatibility score of 80.57% – surely we can do better!
Did you know that more than half of the totla internet traffic comes from mobile devices, especially mobile phones? That said, the average mobile compatibility score globaly is only 80%. This is truly an interesting fact, especially since, if you build your future digital platform using the mobile first mentality, you are sure to do better than that!
That said, we also have to keep in mind that many of these websites rely on separate mobile apps to cater to the needs or their mobile users, so let’s not judge them too harsh. For example, Instagram’s website only scored 60% on the mobile compatibility score, however we all have used the Instagram app at least once in our life, and it runs like a dream.
Another explanaition for some of the websites with low mobile compatibility can also be that their users specifically come mostly from desktop, so, as a strategic decition, they opted tofocus on that side of their platform instead and less on the mobile version.
Whatever the explanation or their reasons are, one thing is sure – 80% mobile compatibility is not even near perfect, and with a little bit of work and dedication, any website can surpass that. More over, if you want to compete with established platforms, you need to be mobile-ready and win the graces of all myghty Google.
That said, our best advice is to employ the services of a developer that has experience with the technology your digital platform is built with, and have them optimise it as best as possible. Also, keep your content flowing and in great quality, and more importantly, engage your users as much as you can.
Also, remember that aside from these interesting 3 insights we preset in our Global Websites Review, we have plenty more info in the full report. So don’t miss out, claim the full report, and plummet yourself in front of your global competition.
Rank | Company | URL | Current Score |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Zalando | zalando.com | 85 |
| 2 | Shopify | shopify.com | 63 |
| 3 | HISTORY | history.com | 80 |
| 4 | Duckduckgo | Duckduckgo.com | 83 |
| 5 | Wikihow | wikihow.com | 80 |
| 6 | Vimeo | vimeo.com | 80 |
| 7 | Mozilla | mozilla.org | 83 |
| 8 | Quora | quora.com | 80 |
| 9 | Instagram.com | 83 | |
| 10 | Wordpress | wordpress.com | 80 |
Rank | Company | URL | Current Score |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Zalando | zalando.com | 85 |
| 2 | Shopify | shopify.com | 63 |
| 3 | HISTORY | history.com | 80 |
| 4 | Duckduckgo | Duckduckgo.com | 83 |
| 5 | Wikihow | wikihow.com | 80 |
| 6 | Vimeo | vimeo.com | 80 |
| 7 | Mozilla | mozilla.org | 83 |
| 8 | Quora | quora.com | 80 |
| 9 | Instagram.com | 83 | |
| 10 | Wordpress | wordpress.com | 80 |
More reports
https://wiredelta.com/top-100-most-popular-websites-in-denmark/
