How Many Websites Are On The Internet?
Internet usage is at all-time highs, making creating or finding new websites easier than ever. Because of increased access, billions of websites are available to Internet users.
In this detailed report, we examine the latest data around the total number of websites on the internet, domain information, and related statistics on website growth over time.
Number Of Websites Stats (Top Picks)
- Today, there are approximately 1,119,023,272 websites on the internet.
- Of the 1.1 billion websites, only 193,890,945 are currently active, or 17.32%.
- Every day. 177,372 new websites are created on the internet.
- 52.1% of all websites on the internet publish web content in English.
- The United States has the most websites, with more than 144.68 million registered domains.
How Many Websites Are On The Internet?
There are 1,119,023,272 websites on the Internet across 270,782,860 registered domains. However, only approximately 193,890,945 websites, or 17.32%, are currently active.
According to Netcraft's survey, September saw an increase of 11.2 million sites compared to August. Based on 2024 data, 48.6 million new websites have been created this year. That equals approximately 177,372 websites per day.
| Timeframe | New Websites |
| Every month | 5,400,000 |
| Every week | 1,215,000 |
| Every day | 177,372 |
| Every hour | 7,390 |
| Every minute | 123.1 |
About 4.34% of all websites are considered new and were created in 2024. Here’s a look at the number of new websites created each month during the year.
| Month | # of New Websites |
| January | 8,900,000 |
| February | 7,800,000 |
| March | 3,200,000 |
| April | 2,800,000 |
| May | 4,400,000 |
| June | 4,000,000 |
| July | 2,700,000 |
| August | 3,600,000 |
| September | 11,200,000 |
Source: Netcraft
Number Of Websites Over Time
On August 6, 1991, Tim Berners-Lee created the first website at CERN. Today, there are over 1.1 billion websites, according to the Netcraft Web Server Surveys.
However, it wasn't until 1994 that websites became available to the general public. This was when noticeable growth in the number of websites on the internet began.
| Year | Number of Websites |
| 1991 | 1 |
| 1992 | 10 |
| 1993 | 130 |
| 1994 | 2,738 |
| 1995 | 23,500 |
| 1996 | 257,601 |
| 2000 | 17,087,182 |
| 2005 | 64,780,617 |
| 2010 | 206,956,723 |
| 2015 | 863,105,652 |
| 2020 | 1,295,973,827 |
| 2024 | 1,119,023,272 |
Notably, the number of websites has declined since 2020 because of the shift to mobile apps, the consolidation of web services, and the change in how websites are tracked today.
New websites are being created every day. In the second quarter of 2024, there were 362.4 million new domain name registrations. That represents an increase of 5.8 million, or 1.6%, year over year.
Of these new domain name registrations, .com was the most popular domain, with 157.6 million registrations.
Meanwhile, .net was the second most popular, with 13.0 million registrations. These two account for 72.6% of total domain registrations.
When accounting for all domains currently on the internet, the figures look a little different. The most popular top-level domain is .com at 44.4%, followed by .org at 4.2%.
Below is a look at the ten most used top-level domains worldwide, according to August 2024 data.
| Top-Level Domain | Share of Global Websites |
| .com | 44.4% |
| .org | 4.2% |
| .de | 3.5% |
| .ru | 3.1% |
| .br | 2.9% |
| .net | 2.5% |
| .uk | 2.4% |
| .jp | 2.1% |
| .it | 1.8% |
| .fr | 1.7% |
Source: CERN, Internet Live Stats, Domain Name Industry Brief (DNIB), Statista
Type Of Websites On The Internet
The Internet is made up of websites in many different categories, including e-commerce stores, blogs, business websites, news sites, social media platforms, and dating. Other categories include online gambling, dating, and pornographic websites.
Current estimates indicate there are 28,254,652 ecommerce websites on the internet. This means roughly 2.52% of websites are online ecommerce stores.
In comparison, 2.23%, or approximately 25 million websites are pornographic sites. However, these sites account for nearly 30% of all web traffic, according to a study conducted in 2023.
However, neither of these website types is even close to being the most popular. Today, there are more than 600 million blog websites on the internet. That makes up 53.6% of the entire internet.
Source: BuiltWith, National Library of Medicine, WebTribunal
Website Statistics by Region
Because website data can be kept privately, it’s harder to determine the number of websites in a specific region or country. Instead, we can look at the number of registered domains to get a closer estimate.
The United States has 144.68 million registered domains, accounting for 18.65% of all domains worldwide. The next highest country is Iceland, with 21.03 million registered domains.
Below is a list of the top nine countries ranked by their total number of registered domains.
| Country | Number of Domains | Share of Total Domains |
| Unknown | 490.54 million | 63.24% |
| United States | 144.68 million | 18.65% |
| Iceland | 21.03 million | 2.71% |
| China | 19.94 million | 2.57% |
| Canada | 9.92 million | 1.28% |
| France | 7.91 million | 1.02% |
| Germany | 7.59 million | 0.98% |
| Japan | 7.40 million | 0.95% |
| United Kingdom | 7.03 million | 0.91% |
| Netherlands | 4.75 million | 0.61% |
Notably, the largest percentage of domains (63.24%) are registered privately. This makes it impossible to know which company they are registered to or where they are hosted from.
Internet users will also notice that the majority of websites are available in English. In fact, 52.1% of websites publish web content in English. The next closest is Spanish at 5.5% and German at 4.8%.
Below, we highlight the top 20 languages and rank them by the share of websites that use this language for web content.
| Language | Share of Websites |
| English | 52.1% |
| Spanish | 5.50% |
| German | 4.80% |
| Russian | 4.50% |
| Japanese | 4.35% |
| French | 4.30% |
| Portuguese | 3.10% |
| Italian | 2.30% |
| Turkish | 2.10% |
| Dutch, Flemish | 1.80% |
| Polish | 1.60% |
| Persian | 1.50% |
| Chinese | 1.30% |
| Vietnamese | 1.20% |
| Indonesian | 1.10% |
| Czech | 0.90% |
| Korean | 0.80% |
| Ukrainian | 0.60% |
| Arabic | 0.60% |
Source: Statista, Domain Name Stat
What Are the Most Visited Websites in the World?
According to Semrush, the most visited website in the world is Google. The site generates 131,203,282,020 visits per month.
Followed by Google is YouTube, which has 71,426,453,827 monthly visits. No other website on the list can match Google and YouTube’s organic traffic results.
Below is a list of the top 15 websites ranked by monthly visits. Please note that explicit websites and duplicates were removed from our list.
| Position | Website | Visits |
| 1 | google.com | 131,203,282,020 |
| 2 | youtube.com | 71,426,453,827 |
| 3 | facebook.com | 12,969,177,779 |
| 4 | wikipedia.org | 6,928,572,568 |
| 5 | instagram.com | 6,500,283,286 |
| 6 | reddit.com | 5,837,443,484 |
| 7 | bing.com | 4,773,894,057 |
| 8 | x.com | 4,347,832,231 |
| 9 | whatsapp.com | 3,827,182,416 |
| 10 | yahoo.com | 3,455,466,435 |
| 11 | twitter.com | 3,312,747,359 |
| 12 | taboola.com | 3,292,884,910 |
| 13 | amazon.com | 3,230,753,511 |
| 14 | chatgpt.com | 3,098,996,168 |
| 15 | yandex.ru | 3,054,029,238 |
Many popular websites like TikTok, Yandex, and DuckDuckGo fall just outside the top 15 but still generate significant traffic.
You can find relevant data like this for any website on the internet using Semrush’s Free Website Checker tool.
Source: Semrush
Conclusion
The internet continues to grow and evolve, with billions of websites now available to users worldwide. Despite the recent slight decline in total website numbers, internet usage remains at an all-time high.
With the rise of AI, mobile apps, and internet giants like Google, Meta, and Amazon, the total number of websites may fluctuate in the coming years.
If you're interested in learning more about internet statistics, check out these related posts: Most Visited Websites In The World and How Many Google Searches Are There Per Day.
