There are tens of millions of websites in the world, and billions of people go on to the internet every year. It used to that people accessed sites on their personal computers. Much traffic now comes from people who just use cell phones. The primary reason for this migration is faster wireless technology, primarily 4G. As this is replaced by 5G, the speeds to connect to the internet via phone will become much, much faster.
Search engine sites have been among the most used per year since before the advent of broadband. Initially, this included Yahoo! and Altavista (a site that has largely disappeared). Google became the leading search engine over a decade ago, a position it still holds.
Another leading category is social media. Facebook has 2.9 billion users, a significant percentage of the world’s population.
Cloudflare ranks the most visited domain each year. In 2020, Google had the lead by far, including its maps, books, photos and news. That changed in 2021. The leader this year is TikTok:
It was on February 17, 2021, that TikTok got the top spot for a day. Back in March, TikTok got a few more days and also in May, but it was after August 10, 2021, that TikTok took the lead on most days. There were some days when Google was #1, but October and November were mostly TikTok’s days, including on Thanksgiving (November 25) and Black Friday (November 26).
TikTok is a fairly new site, compared to its traffic rivals. It is only five years old. It hosts short-form videos, and its owner is the Chinese company ByteDance. Microsoft tried to buy the site in August 2020, a move that was blocked by then-President Donald Trump.
These are the 10 most visited websites in the world for 2021:
- TikTok.com
- Google.com
- Facebook.com
- Microsoft.com
- Apple.com
- Amazon.com
- Netflix.com
- YouTube.com
- Twitter.com
- WhatsApp.com
Click here to see 24/7 Wall St. traffic.
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