Web traffic increases in 2019 were driven by mobile; top 100 sites saw average of 223B monthly visits

Published February 10, 2020

Mobile adoption around the world is having a significant impact on the web’s traffic. According to a new report from SimilarWeb, out today, mobile web traffic has jumped 30.6% since 2017, while desktop traffic dropped 3.3%. But it’s not just the numbers that are changing. Mobile visitors also behave differently from their desktop web counterparts, staying on pages for shorter periods of time, for example, which is impacting core metrics web publishers today track.

The report found that 2019’s total web traffic to the top 100 sites was up 8% from 2018, and up 11.8% over 2017, averaging 223 billion visits per month. The largest increases were in April and June 2019, when traffic was up by more than 10% over the same time in 2018.

Mobile is driving these traffic increases, but mobile visitors don’t stay as long on the site. Across platforms, the overall time spent on websites has dropped by 49 seconds from 2017 to 2019, the report found.

In addition, mobile has become the platform of choice for visiting certain categories of websites. Mobile traffic dwarfs desktop on adult sites, gambling sites, food & drink, pets & animals, health, community & society, sports and lifestyle. And over the years, other categories shifted to become more mobile as well — including news and media, vehicle sites, travel, reference, finance and others.

But not all categories are doing well, despite the shift to mobile.

News sites, for instance, were losing traffic. The report found that traffic to the top 100 media publications is down 5.3% year-over-year from 2018 to 2019 (a loss of 4 billion visits), and down by 7% since 2017.

These decreases impact all sorts of media categories, with popular news, entertainment news and local news all showing decreases of more than 25%. Only business & finance and women’s interest news categories saw any increases, the report said.

The increase in mobile traffic is also helping the biggest sites on the web grow larger, helping to further cement their position on today’s internet. The top 10 biggest sites saw a total of 167.5 billion monthly visits in 2019, up 10.7% over 2018. The remaining 90 biggest sites out of the top 100 only saw a 2.3% increase, by comparison.

Google’s move to consolidate traffic to its core domain increased traffic to google.com; YouTube grew as well. However, Facebook’s troubles were reflected in its numbers as it lost 8.6% of traffic over the past year alone. The report theorized that some of its lost traffic went to YouTube, which could inform Facebook’s heavier focus on video in recent years. That said, Facebook’s investments in mobile helped it grow elsewhere — both Instagram and WhatsApp saw their web traffic grow up to 74% year-over-year.

Also on the decline were Yahoo, which lost 33.6% of its 2017 traffic, and Tumblr, which banned adult sites in 2018, leading to a 33% loss in traffic.

Facebook fought off the web traffic declines and related declines in app usage by re-engaging existing users in 2019, which helped it to increase the total number of app sessions throughout the year. YouTube uses a similar tactic to increase its own app engagement figures, leading to a close tie between the two on this metric.

The data for the report was gathered from January 2017 to December 2019, and tracked desktop and mobile web traffic, as well as Android app use.

The full report, available here, also dug into specific categories, like shopping, travel, finance, messaging and more.

Google makes mobile-first indexing the default for all new domains

Published May 28, 2019

At the end of 2018, Google said mobile-first indexing — that is, using a website’s mobile version to index its pages — was being used for more than half the web pages in Google search results. Today, Google announced that mobile-first indexing will now be the default for all new web domains as of July 1, 2019.

That means that when a new website is registered it will be crawled by Google’s smartphone Googlebot, and its mobile-friendly content will be used to index its pages, as well as to understand the site’s structured data and to show snippets from the site in Google’s search results, when relevant.

The mobile-first indexing initiative has come a long way since Google first announced its plans back in 2016. In December 2017, Google began to roll out mobile-first indexing to a small handful of sites, but didn’t specify which ones were in this early test group. Last March, mobile-indexing began to roll out on a broader scale. By year-end, half the pages on the web were indexed by Google’s smartphone Googlebot.

Google explained the change to how sites are indexed is aimed at helping the company’s “primarily mobile” users to better search the web. Since 2015, the majority of Google users start their searches from mobile devices. It only makes sense, then, that the mobile versions of the website — and not the desktop pages — would be used to deliver the search results.

Mobile-first indexing isn’t the only way that Google has begun catering to the larger mobile majority.

Several years ago, it also began to boost the rank of mobile-friendly webpages in search. Last year, it added a signal that uses page speed to help determine a page’s mobile search ranking. Starting in July 2018, slow-loading content became downranked.

While many sites today now show the same content to users across desktop and mobile, those that have not yet achieved this parity have a variety of resources to help them get started. Site owners can check for mobile-first indexing of their website by using the URL Inspection Tool in the search console to see when the site was last crawled and indexed. Google also offers a host of documentation on how to make websites work for mobile-first indexing, and suggests that websites support responsive web design — not separate mobile URLs.

“We’re happy to see how the web has evolved from being focused on desktop, to becoming mobile-friendly, and now to being mostly crawlable and indexable with mobile user-agents,” said Google, in its announcement today.