The most visited websites in the world are—of course—well-known websites for most of us. In the Top 10, we find websites such as Google, Youtube, Netflix, Facebook, and Baidu. No surprises there.
Comparatively, the Top 10 most visited websites in specific categories such as SaaS, FinTech, E-Learning, and Cryptocurrency, or the most common CMS, Analytics, and E-Commerce technologies used by the world’s most popular websites are probably less well known for most of us. However, that needn't be the case. This kind of specific information doesn’t have to be less well-known or harder to get a hold of.
In fact, we’ve recently added data concerning the 7 million most visited websites in the world to our company database, which makes it easy to get a hold of this kind of detailed website information. This dataset, combined with our proprietary industry data, allows for the effective analysis of website popularity across many different sectors. Let’s take a look.
Most popular websites by industry
For demonstrative purposes, we’ve completed an analysis of the 50,000 most visited websites in the world. By using our proprietary AI-based industry classification system, Vainu Custom Industry, we were able to uncover some interesting trends.
Education
First off, there are a lot of Education related websites in the Top 50,000. In fact, our AI model classifies 10% of the websites as being related to Education. Of those 10%, one-fifth are E-Learning websites. Medium.com, sciencedirect.com, wikipedia.org, and researchgate.net are some examples of Education websites that rank in the Top 200 websites globally.
Software & SaaS
“Software is eating the world” is a common saying these days, and it receives some support from our findings: 14% of the Top 50,000 websites were labeled as being related to Software. Moreover, delivering software through the cloud is becoming commonplace: 5% of the sampled websites were labeled as SaaS.
There are many well-known Software and SaaS businesses on the list, such as microsoft.com, zoom.us, wordpress.com, dropbox.com, and shopify.com. But there are also several industry and department-specific vendor websites, such as surveymonkey.com, zendesk.com, hubspot.com, and mailchimp.com. All of these examples belong to the Top 250 websites globally.
B2C & E-Commerce
Of course, B2C businesses and E-Commerce websites attract a lot of visitors. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that there are many fashion and retail sites on the top lists. In the West, everyone knows amazon.com, in China aliexpress.com reigns supreme, while flipkart.com is one of the go-to websites in India. There are many marketplaces such as etsy.com and discogs.com and of course global giants such as walmart.com, ikea.com, hm.com, and target.com. Many of the luxury brands and sites are also ranking high such as farfetch.com, ssense.com, gucci.com, and chanel.com.
Emerging industries
There are also a number of popular websites that are related to more “modern” industry segments. In the Top 50,000 websites, there are more than a hundred websites labeled as being related to Cryptocurrency. Some examples are coinmarketcap.com, binance.com, and etoro.com. Some of the hundreds of Virtual Reality related websites on the list are oculus.com, secondlife.com, and sketchfab.com.
Here are some quick additional figures highlighting the degree to which different industries are present in the Top 50,000 websites globally:
- Biotechnology 1.8%
- Fintech 2.0%
- Social Media 2.2%
- Marketing Automation 1.1%
- News 5.1% (people still read news, especially online!)
- Dating 0.3%
- Manufacturing 2.1%
- Travel 1.0%
- Real Estate 1.0%
- Health Care 2.9%
- Music 1.1%
- Sports 1.2%
- Gaming 0.6%
Most popular website technologies
We also decided to analyze the Top 50,000 websites to see which web technologies they were using. Most websites require quite a few pieces of software to work properly. There is of course the CMS platform the website is built on. These websites generally also have some kind of analytics software connected. Additionally, they often link to social media platforms, and many of them include embedded content from other sites. Thousands of websites are built for selling products and goods, so e-commerce software plays a big role, just like different payment methods.
For companies selling anything website-related, understanding website popularity gives a good starting point for allocating scarce resources. Whether you’re selling analytics, optimization, conversion improvements, e-commerce logistics, website chat, site plugins, or e-commerce toolkit, you want to target the segment that will be the most fruitful for you.
Unsurprisingly, Google is the number one technology vendor among the world’s most popular websites. They have several tools that many of the websites use, such as Google Analytics and Ads. Adobe is also one of the most frequently used technologies: We detected that ~10% of the websites are using one of Adobe’s products.
CMS
WordPress is the leading provider of CMS, with one out of ten of these websites being built on WordPress. There are also a lot of Drupal sites, and, interestingly, quite a few sites built on wix.com, which is typically seen as a solution for small and medium businesses.
Analytics
These sites also invest heavily in understanding their users and traffic. Hotjar is used by more than a thousand sites, and Optimizely and Segment Mixpanel are tracking data for hundreds of these sites. Search engine optimization is important, too. There are many specific vendors—such as Ahrefs and Yoast SEO—that are widely used.
Embedded content
YouTube also features heavily on these websites, with 11.5% of them having embedded Youtube videos. There are also hundreds of websites using Wistia for the same use case.
E-Commerce & Payment
Shopify is the most popular e-Commerce platform, another popular one is Magento. These sites provide a variety of payment options. Mastercard is the most popular one with 4.4 % of the top websites using it as a payment option. It’s followed by American Express, Visa, and Stripe.
CRM
One of the most well-known enterprise software vendors is Salesforce. Based on our data, roughly 5% of these sites use Salesforce CRM. In this segment, it’s more popular than HubSpot, which has a bit more than 1% market share in this category.
Other popular technologies used by these sites are:
- Slack ~10% (team collaboration)
- Mailchimp 4.5% (email marketing)
- New relic 4.3% (site performance)
- Atlassian 3.8% (productivity)
- Zendesk 2.9% (support and customer service)
- Docusign 2.4% (e-Sign)
- Miro 0.7% (visual collaboration)
- Intercom 0.6% (support and customer service)
- Drift 0.4% (chat)
Importance of website traffic for sales and marketing professionals
In this post, we have shared some insights on the most popular websites in the world. This analysis used the Top 50,000 websites in the world as its sample, but in total, we have more than 40,000,000 (that’s 40 million) websites in our database. You might be wondering how this data would be of help to you, so here's a tangible use case:
It is quite common for analytics, optimization, and intent data tools to bill their customers based on website traffic directly (sessions) or indirectly (conversions). If that's the case, why should such companies use revenue or employee count as a size indicator in the segmentation process when website traffic could be used instead? More traffic, more potential billing. Such companies could then combine this with accurate industries based on website content (e.g. SaaS, Fintech, Fashion), and web technologies (e.g. prospects using competing or complementing technology) and get refined target segments, e.g. SaaS companies with high website traffic using a competing analytics tool.
Next steps
If website ranking, technology data, or industry verticals are something you’d like to have access to, here are a few easy ways how to make it happen:
- We give a free trial for our API that covers all these data points. You can easily check individual websites and/or build lists based on specific criteria. Did you know that our API also allows you to create a CSV file directly from that API call?
- All Vainu platform users can access technology data. If you want a free demo, we’re happy to organize it. Existing users can contact support if they want to activate Vainu Custom Industry data for their subscription.
- These data points would be valuable in CRM and marketing automation platforms, too. Vainu integrates with Salesforce, Dynamics 365, Hubspot, and Pipedrive. Reach out to us and we can not only add these data points to your CRM but also keep them up to date automatically.
