39+ Fresh Website Statistics and Trends to Know in 2024

Mor Mester 14 August 2024

Building a website is easy. You can create them with drag-and-drop page builders and easy-to-use CMS platforms. And you don’t need to know how to code.

Building a fast site that gets conversions is a different story. Even if your website builder does the heavy lifting, you still need to do speed and conversion optimization.

In this article, we collected the latest website statistics you must know for a fast and high-converting website.

General Website Statistics

1. There are 1,090,117,902 sites across 271,804,260 domains and 12,627,575 web-facing computers.

2. 252,000 new websites are created every day, 10,500 new websites every hour, 175 every minute, and 3 new websites every second.

3. 28.8% of business is online in 2024. It has been increasing in recent years–the total percentage was 25.8% in 2022 and 26.9% in 2023.

4. 24% of small businesses set up a website to feature their products and services. 17% created a site for customers to make a purchase, and another 17% use it to establish their credibility and authority.

5. WordPress is by far the most popular CMS, with a 62.7% market share. Shopify is second with only 6.4%, and Wix is in third place with 3.9%.

6. The cheapest site creation option is a website builder, which costs $0 to $50 monthly. WordPress has an upfront cost of between $35 and $780 and additional ongoing monthly costs from $11 to $50. But if you want a more convenient, albeit more expensive, way of launching your website, hiring a web designer at $500 to $10,000+ should be your choice.

7. Wix is the most used simple website builder on the internet, with 10.5% market share. It’s followed by Squarespace (5.48%) and GoDaddy Website Builder (2.45%).

8. Amazon has the largest market share among web hosting providers, with 5.6%. Shopify (4.4%), Newfold Digital Group (3.6%), OVH (3.2%), and Hostinger (2.8%) round out the top five.

9. Google Chrome has the highest browser market share worldwide at 65.1%, followed by Safari (18.2%) and Microsoft Edge (5.2%).

Website Traffic Statistics

1. Direct drives the most traffic out of all channels at 58%. It is followed by organic search (29%), referrals (8%), and organic social (2%).

2. 21% of small businesses say low website traffic is their biggest challenge. The lack of time and knowledge to maintain a website (14%) and changes in search engine ranking (12%) follow.

3. Google.com has the highest search engine market share worldwide, with 91.61%. Bing (3.32%) and Yandex (1.83%) follow it.

4. 90% of enterprise companies plan to prioritize organic search. The reason is search’s continued growth. 73% of clicks this year go to organic web results.

5. The first page on Google Search results with the “People also ask” SERP feature has an average CTR of 87.9%. The second and third places get 15.28% and 8.55%, respectively.

6. The average click-through rate for search advertising is 6.11%, cost per click is $4.22, conversion rate is 7.04% and cost per lead is $53.52. 

7. Google.com received approximately 9 billion unique monthly visitors between September and November 2023, making it the most popular website worldwide. YouTube.com and Facebook.com were ranked second and third, with an estimated 5.66 and 3.02 billion unique monthly visitors.

8. YouTube.com users spend approximately 35 minutes and 42 seconds per visit, making it the most engaging website worldwide. Facebook.com was second in user engagement, with an average visit duration of 22 minutes and 25 seconds.

Website User Experience Statistics

1. A slow-loading website is the top reason visitors leave a site at 88.5%. It’s followed by a non-responsive website (73.1%), bad navigation (61.5%), outdated design (38.5%), poor content structure (34.6%), and intrusive use of audio and video (3.8%) round out the list.

2. 28% of visitors are willing to wait for loading on their mobile phones before leaving the site. 26% are willing to wait if the site loads longer than 5 seconds.

3. 82% of the B2B pages loaded within 5 seconds. As for B2C businesses, 86% of their pages loaded in 5 seconds or less.

4. A page that loads in 1 second has an average conversion rate of almost 40%. The conversion rate drops as loading time increases. A page with a 2-second load time has a 34% conversion rate, while a page loading in 3 seconds has a 29% conversion rate. The average conversion rate of a landing page is 26%.

5. The average ecommerce conversion rate is 3.05% when the page loads within 2 seconds. The conversion rate of an ecommerce page that loads in 4 seconds is 0.67%. Ecommerce conversion rates further dip by an average of 0.3% for every additional second it takes for the site to load.

6. Photoshop is the most popular UI/UX tool used by web designers with 88.5%. It’s followed by Illustrator (76.9%), Sketch (75%), and InDesign (32.1%).

7. 43% of small businesses intend to improve their site’s overall page speed and performance. 30% plan to embed videos on web pages, responding to Google’s algorithm updates that prioritize video content on websites.

Mobile Website Statistics

1. 61.19% of all website traffic is from a mobile device while 38.81% is on desktops.

2. 92.3% of people use a mobile phone or smartphone to access the internet. 65.6% use either a laptop or a desktop. 31.9% use a television connected to the internet, and 27.3% access the internet from their tablet devices.

3. Africa has the highest share of mobile internet traffic at 69.13%, a +12.24% difference from the global average. Asia comes in the second spot at 65.2%. The region with the lowest share of mobile internet traffic is Oceania at 39.51%.

4. The country with the lowest mobile internet traffic is Russia at 30.2%. Portugal (34.12%) and Canada (37.71%) round out the bottom 3.

5. Among the various online activities mobile users participate in, 68% play video games. Others listen to music (67%), use social media (63%), watch videos, TV, or film (61%), and pay for something online (47%).

6. Smartphones make up 78% of global retail site traffic and 66% of online shopping orders.

7. Mobile commerce’s popularity in Asia is linked to countries like China or South Korea, whose citizens use mobile devices to generate more than two-thirds of their total online sales.

8. Mobile devices bring 313% more visitors and 233% more unique visitors than desktop. Bounce rates are also higher at 59.74% compared to 49.8% desktops.

Web Design Statistics

1. 35.1% of web design companies quote their clients between $1,000 and $1,500 for a website design. 24.3% quote from $2000 to $2500, and 16.21% charge $3,000.

2. The top factor influencing web design costs is including features and functionalities (61.5%). The quality of UI/UX design and responsiveness to multiple devices are tied for second (46.1%). The type of content management system and the site’s usability and navigation (34.6%) are tied for third.

3. 80.7% of web designers take a month to design a website. 27% take two months to complete a site, and 24.3% require one and a half months to finish a web design project.

4. The latest web design trends are flat design (88.5%), expressive typography (61.5%), broken grid layouts (38.5%), virtual reality video (26.9%), and voice user interface and search (23.1%).

5. The most common website design mistakes that even professionals make are crowded web design (84.6%), no call-to-action (38.5%), hidden navigation (30.8%), bad web typography (26.9%), and poor use of whitespace (19.2%).

6. The top reasons to redesign websites are low conversion rate (80.8%), high bounce rate (65.4%), and better user experience (61.5%).

7. Companies prefer hiring a professional web designer to have a completely customized website (53.8%), professional design (23.1%), optimized for conversion (19.2%), and ongoing support (3.9%).

8. The top 3 worst website design mistakes are non-responsive site designs (64.29%), no or terrible call to actions (48.21%), and use of poor images (42.56%).

How to Improve Website Performance

We prepared some tips based on the data above so you can get the most out of your website.

Make Your Site Load Faster

Website builders and ecommerce platforms, like Wix or Shopify, have hosting. This is convenient, if you’re building your first site and don’t have the tech know-how.

But if you want complete control over your site speed, you should host it on a good web hosting service and have a professional content management system (CMS) like WordPress. This is a bit harder to set up, but tweaking its settings allows you to speed up loading time much faster than website builders.

You can improve your site’s loading speed and make it more user-friendly by using a caching tool that saves your site files in visitors’ browsers. So, whenever they visit again, the browser locally loads the content, resulting in faster loading times than fetching the files from the servers. Other features of a caching tool include the ability to minimize CSS and JavaScript.

Consider compressing images to reduce their file sizes without compromising quality. This is especially important for image-heavy sites, like ecommerce and photography website owners who rely on tons of visuals to showcase their products.

To make sure you have optimized your site for speed, check which pages on your domain have a failing Core Web Vitals score on your Google Search Console for free. Another way to do this is by running each page on Google PageSpeed Insights to see its scores. 

Both tools will uncover issues causing your site to load poorly and preventing visitors from having a good experience.

Optimize Your Website for Conversions

Attracting tons of traffic so people learn about your business is good. But getting visitors to click a button, purchase your products and services, or fill out your form is even better.

At the same time, it’s not just about adding a form or button on your website. You have to use the right colors, copy, and size for the buttons and minimize the required fields for visitors to fill out in a form to maximize conversions.

Make sure the button colors contrast your website theme to make them stand out. Also, use action words in your button’s copy and encourage people to click on it. 

Limit form fields to 3 if you can (preferably name, email, and one more relevant to your business). Reducing the fields makes filling out the form more effortless for visitors, paving the way for more submissions.

Placement is another factor to consider when generating higher conversion rates. Ideally, your calls to action appear above the fold so almost all visitors see and take action on them.

Promote Your Site

Once you’ve optimized your website for conversions, it’s time to attract more visitors. As the stats mentioned above, one of the best channels to get traffic is SEO.

Identify relevant keywords for creating and optimizing web pages. Write blog posts filled with value, serving the search intent to rank for your target keywords on search results. And showcase your knowledge and expertise about your topic and industry. AI writing tools make it easier to plan and create content for SEO. But don’t forget to fact-check and edit AI-generated content. You’ll also need to build backlinks from authoritative websites to increase your rankings in Google search results. Many of the best email outreach tools have specific features for link-building to make it quicker.

At the same time, you can’t entirely rely on search engines for traffic, as it’s just one of the many channels. For example, a Google algorithm update may put your site off to pasture if you’ve been careless with your SEO strategy, such as building questionable backlinks or creating unhelpful content.

A good way to maintain traffic on your website is to diversify your traffic sources. Build an email list and send relevant content to your subscribes. Share your blog content on your social media channels. 

Like SEO, however, each channel has specific methods to help spread the word about your content to your target audience. For social media, you must mix promotional posts with engaging ones like asking questions, running surveys, and sharing tips. For email campaigns, you must use email marketing tools to set up an opt-in form on your site to get more sign-ups for your list. You can find important email marketing statistics here to guide your email marketing strategy.

Create a process using the tactics above to help you attract your audience and build a following from different channels without relying on a single traffic source.

Spy on Your Competitors

Knowing the best practices for effectively promoting your site to your target audience is one thing. Understanding what produces results in your industry is another. Prime your website for success by knowing what your top competitors are doing to generate traffic, leads, and sales. 

Using rank tracking tools, you can see:

• what keywords they rank for in organic search results, 
• the estimated traffic for each keyword, 
• the backlinks they have that you don’t, 
• the queries they’re bidding for on paid search, 
• and their ad copies. 

You can also use this data to guide your strategy. You can learn more in our full SEO rank monitoring guide. A traffic checker like Similarweb also gives you insights about your competitors’ strategies.

An app like Sprout Social can check your competitors’ social media posts and identify which generated the most impressions and conversions. 

The tactics your competitors use that you must employ on your own website vary depending on your business goals and objectives. But by better understanding market gaps, you get to position your website to capitalize on overlooked opportunities and give you an advantage over the competition.

Monitor Its Traffic

After launching your website and campaigns to drive more traffic, check traffic using SEO reporting tools and software like Google Analytics for traffic analysis. You’ll find valuable insights on what brings the most traffic.

These tools should tell you the traffic sources that drove visitors to your site and if they align with your goals. Analyze how many visitors converted into leads or customers and what you can do to improve your conversion rate. 96.45% of website visitors aren’t ready to buy, make sure you have forms and landing pages so you can get contact information from visitors who aren’t ready to make a purchase.

If your site is attracting traffic from a specific location, you should double down on it to maximize your traffic. As for tactics that aren’t drawing visitors, consider reworking or canceling them and reallocating your resources to other more effective tactics.

Understanding user behavior is important to increase conversions. You want to know how users browse your web pages and interact with the elements. A heatmapping platform like Hotjar helps uncover which part of the page most visitors leave and which elements they click on the most.

Once you have the reports, think of ways to help convince readers to scroll down the button of the page and move your CTAs to areas on the page where most visitors interact.

If you feel like outsourcing website building and content marketing, you can discover and hire top talent on the best freelance marketing websites.

Did you know ChatGPT reached 1 million users in 5 days? Find more interesting ChatGPT statistics here.

About Mor Mester

Mor Mester is the Head of Content Marketing at EmailVendorSelection. He's an email marketing and marketing automation expert with 6+ years of experience. Having tested and reviewed 100+ email marketing, marketing automation, CRM, ecommerce, SMS marketing, email verification, online course, and lead generation tools, he knows a good business software when he sees one.
After work, you can find him riding his bike on some trails.

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