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The world's most popular websites

We spend so much time online these days that websites such as YouTube, Facebook and, of course, Google, have become part of our day-to-day lives.

However, when we look at Alexa's rankings of the world's most popular websites, you may be surprised by just how many you've never even heard of.

Worldwide

Despite being relatively unknown to Brits and Americans, these sites are amongst the most popular in some of the world's most populated countries, including China and Russia, each receiving millions of visitors every day.

(Below you'll find the websites with the highest amount of page views and visitors as per Alexa's ranking)

world's most popular websites image
world's most popular websites

Sector

The majority of the sites in the world's 100 most popular are 'web services' sites (18), which includes the likes of email providers and internet security services, as well as the likes of office.com and WordPress.

Social media followed with 17 sites, followed by news, online stores and video/music streaming services in joint third with 13 inclusions each.

Sector

Who owns the world's most popular websites?

When looking at the companies behind the world's most popular websites, it's interesting to see that Google, who many assume 'own the internet' only hold two of the top 100 spots with Google and YouTube.

Instead, it's the likes of Alibaba, Amazon and Facebook (each with three) who dominates the list, with Microsoft coming out on top with five (including LinkedIn, MSN and GitHub).

world's most popular websites
UK traffic
UK's most popular websites

How long are we spending on our favourite sites?

While we all know the UK's most popular sites, the sites that we spend the longest on might raise a few eyebrows, with three of the top five falling into the 'adult' category!

timings for websites

At the other end of the scale, the bottom five is largely made up of news sites which rely on a lot of 'clickbait' links from social media such as LadBible and HITC, which users typically abandon not long after landing on.

timings
US Traffic
US most popular websites

How long are we spending on our favourite sites?

As well as adult sites, Americans spend the longest time on a couple of sites which you may not have heard of before: salesforce.com (18:38) and Shopify (14:38), which are more likely being used in the workplace.

US time

Among the sites that Americans spend the least time on were identity management company Okta (1:10), Pandora Radio (1:50) and surprisingly, Netflix (2:03).

US times

Brought to you by Compare the Market, the broadband experts.

Brought to you by Compare the Market