As summer rolled in, we prepared a fresh new batch of reports looking at June 2021 and the analysis of the most popular websites in the world – the global website analysis edition. In this report, you get to see the most successful websites on a global scale and how they perform. 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 the world nowadays, our official borders do not limit our reach anymore. And that means users find a way to reach companies, even though companies had no plans of internationalization.
This, as you have already guessed and imagined, means more competition, and things are only getting more and more complex from here. However, in order to help you leverage the competition, we examined the average website scores per sector and the average loading time of each industry within the global market, recorded in June 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 three months we will refresh our data and our Global Websites Review results to keep you updated on top of your competition at all times.
Key take-aways in June
Top 3 Global Websites
This month’s Global Websites Review has been some minor shifts. DuckDuckgo, the first contender for the past 3 months has still been number one, and it is the best performing one among the global websites! Following this, Shopify has been maintaining the second as last time when we did the review. And Zalando ranked third in this competition.
DuckDuckGo, an alternative search engine focused on privacy and data security has been at our top 1 before. And in June, it still took first place with an outstanding score of 85 and even improving the loading speed from 0.2s to 0.18s this time. Impressive!
Shopify maintained their second place, after scoring the same score of 85 as of last time’s result, and what’s more, there is an improvement in their loading speed from 0.26s to 0.22s. While in March they took the second spot with 0.26s which was already an improvement from last time of 0.36s, this month they recorded an average of 0.22s, making them only 0.04s slower than the first place. What a race! We can see from the results that Shopify has been working to improve even more, especially the loading speed part.
Finally, the third place in June went to a German multi-national E-commerce company based in Berlin, Zalando. Zalando offers fashion and lifestyle products such as apparel and shoes, pushed down wikiHow, the third-best performance in March. Zalando scored 83 on our analysis tool in March and registered a speed of 0.3s, and they not only scored 85 in June but also improved the page speed to 0.29s.
If there is anything we should take from this new top 3 ranking is their speeds. From the report, we can see how incredible the speeds are. Neither contender has gone past 0.3s, which we believe is the reason why makes them hard to beat. But considering every three months, we probably see different names on this list, there is still hope for the rest of the other websites.
As we always say, optimization is an ongoing process and your website has the potential to move up in rank every time.
Top 3 Sectors
In the top 3 sectors segment for June, we see Apparel is taking the lead once again with an average score of 78, which is one point higher than last month. Moreover, the average speed is improving from 0.33s to 0.23s compared to March. What an improvement!
In second place we have Motor Vehicles and Parts, with a score of 77, at a tie with Transportation. And again, page speed determined the winner. Motors Vehicles and Parts recorded an average of 0.42s, which is a little bit slower than the result of last time in March.
As for our third place, Transportation keeps the bronze with the same score as last month of 74, but we see an average speed went down from 0.46s to 0.59s. There is definitely an improvement to get it in the second place for the next time.
The interesting thing to note is that the sectors that scored fairly better are actually not performed the best when it comes to average speed, and the Food, Beverages, Tobacco & Drug stores sector actually runs the fastest which recorded an average of 0.17s.
On the Mobile Compatibility map, we can see that the winner goes to Food, Beverages, Tobacco & Drug stores sector with a score of 90. And following, Business sector scored 83.08 took the second place. The third one goes to Retailing with a score of 81.43. Besides the top 3, Apparel, Finance, Motor Vehicles & Parts and Hotels, Restaurants & Leisure performed almost the same, reaching 80 each.
In this segment, in fact, the best performance is again the Food, Beverages, Tobacco & Drug stores sector, improving from the score of 86.67 to 90.
Top 3 Insights in Global Websites Review
It’s always important to know who are the top players in each market, especially if you are thinking of starting a new business, and it is extra vital to know everything you can about the sector that you are going to start with. 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 you are just 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 70.46 – slightly lower than in March
It is undoubted that reaching a score of 85 for a site is an incredible, undeniable achievement we all should 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 70.46. More importantly, we also should note that this is a decrease from the last time when the result was done in March, which shows the importance of constant optimization.
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.
And this is the reason why we strongly believe that a website which is well taken care of, can easily reach the 85 top scores and even surpass it! But what about speed?
2. Loading times are faster this month – the average loading time Globally is 0.79s compared to 0.92 in March
Well, when it comes to loading speed, our Global Websites Review revealed an average loading time of 0.79s, which is slightly better than the result of last time: 0.92s. It is a good sign that the global websites are improving to meet the suggestion from Google for mobile websites that the loading speed is better under 1s.
What might be interesting to mention here is that, while average scores by sectors are very close together, keeping the results between 65 to 80, the load speed by sector varies quite a lot. However, what is even more intriguing is that Technology, a sector that most of us would probably expect to see in the top performer, is actually lagging behind with 0.77s, quite a margin compared to the top performer 0.17s.
In fact, with a score of 70.22, Technology actually only surpassed the bottom three sectors, and they are Food, Beverages, Tobacco & Drugs which scored 68.33, Hotels, Restaurants & Leisure which scored 68, and the continuous last place holder Retailing scored 66.30.
3. The Global Websites Review shows an average Mobile Compatibility score of 81.05% – surely we can do better!
Did you know that more than half of the total internet traffic comes from mobile devices, especially mobile phones? That said, the average mobile compatibility score globally is only around 81%. This is a truly interesting fact, especially if you want to build your future digital platform using mobile, you definitely need 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 of their mobile users, so let’s not judge them too harshly. For example, Instagram’s website only scored 60 on mobile compatibility.
However, we all have been using the Instagram app at least once in our life – or even multiple times for a lot of people in a day, and it still runs like a dream. Most users actually don’t think Instagram is loading too slow, especially since Instagram is mostly loading a lot of pictures and stories.
Another explanation for some of the websites with low mobile compatibility can also be that their users specifically come mostly from desktops. So, as a strategic decision, they opted to focus on that side of their platform instead of on the mobile version.
No matter what the explanation or their reasons are, one thing is for sure – 80% mobile compatibility is not even near perfect, and with a little bit of work and dedication, any website can surpass that. Moreover, if you want to compete with those established platforms, you need to be mobile-friendly and win the graces of all-mighty Google.
That said, our best advice is to employ the services of a developer that has experience with the technology that your digital platform needs to build with, and have them optimize it as best as possible. Also, keep your content flowing in great quality, and more importantly, engage your users as much as you can.
Also, remember that aside from these interesting 3 insights we present in our Global Websites Review, we have plenty more information in the full report. So don’t miss out, claim the full report, and make yourself a shining star in front of your global competition.
Rank | Company | URL | Current Score |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Shopify | shopify.com | 85 |
| 2 | Duckduckgo | Duckduckgo.com | 85 |
| 3 | Zalando | zalando.com | 85 |
| 4 | Mozilla | mozilla.org | 85 |
| 5 | Vimeo | vimeo.com | 85 |
| 6 | Wiki How | wikihow.com | 83 |
| 7 | Slack | slack.com | 83 |
| 8 | Wiktionary | wiktionary.org | 80 |
| 9 | Instagram.com | 80 | |
| 10 | Quora | quora.com | 80 |
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