Website Statistics 2026: How Many Websites Are There?

Netcraft’s July 2026 Web Server Survey received responses from 1,494,915,628 sites across 305,348,459 domains and 14,772,048 web-facing computers. The same survey counted 216,702,733 active sites in July 2026. Website statistics come apart at that gap, because the headline count and the working count describe different objects.

Verisign put the total at 401.6 million domain name registrations across all top-level domains at the close of the second quarter of 2026. Three organizations publish three defensible numbers, and none of them is wrong. What follows separates what each one measures. It then covers the server software, protocols, top-level domains, content languages, and page weights that W3Techs, Cloudflare, and the HTTP Archive each track separately.

Key Takeaways

• Netcraft’s July 2026 survey received responses from 1,494,915,628 sites, an increase of 5.5 million sites from the previous month.
• Active sites are 14.5% of the hostnames Netcraft sees, so roughly one in seven responding hostnames serves real content.
• Hostnames grew 38.5% between January 2024 and July 2026, while active sites grew 12.6% across the same window.
• Domain name registrations rose by 29.9 million, or 8.1%, year over year to the close of the second quarter of 2026.
• 90.0% of all websites use HTTPS as their default protocol.
• WordPress is used by 40.7% of all websites, a content management system market share of 58.9%.
• Googlebot took more than a quarter of Verified Bot traffic on the Cloudflare network in 2025, with OpenAI’s GPTBot next at about 7.5%.

Editor’s Choice

• Hostnames responding: 1,494,915,628 sites in the July 2026 Netcraft survey.
• Active sites: 216,702,733 in July 2026.
• Registered domains: 401.6 million across all top-level domains at the close of the second quarter of 2026.
• Most common top-level domain: .com, used by 43.6% of all the websites.
• Most common content language: English, used by 49.5% of all the websites whose content language is known.
• Median page weight: 2.6 MB on mobile in 2025.

How Many Websites Are There in 2026?

• Netcraft received responses from 1,494,915,628 sites in July 2026, across 305,348,459 domains.
• Netcraft’s parallel active-site count for July 2026 was 216,702,733.
• Verisign recorded 401.6 million domain name registrations across all top-level domains at the close of the second quarter of 2026.
• Netcraft also counted 14,772,048 web-facing computers in the same July 2026 survey.
• Netcraft’s hostname count runs 6.9 times its own active-site count for the same month.
• The .com and .net top-level domains together held 179.1 million registrations at the close of the second quarter of 2026.

Source: Netcraft Web Server Survey July 2026; Verisign Domain Name Industry Brief Q2 2026

About This Data

These website statistics are compiled from 10 cited findings drawn from 8 source pages. Verisign and Cloudflare are Tier 1 (the companies that run these systems). Netcraft, W3Techs, and the HTTP Archive Web Almanac are Tier 2 (independent industry surveys), published between December 2025 and September 2026. Only sources that publish their own measurement and state a methodology qualify, and figures are updated when those sources publish new editions.

A hostname is a name that answered. A registered domain is a name that was paid for. An active site returned something a person could read. Most published answers pick one of the three and drop the label.

One category is missing on purpose. Most-visited-site rankings, total visit counts, and per-site valuations have no free primary source, so they are omitted rather than restated from a reseller.

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Website Growth Trend: Hostnames vs Active Sites

• Netcraft counted 1,079,154,539 hostnames and 192,375,760 active sites in January 2024.
• By January 2026, the same survey recorded 1,376,952,390 hostnames against 207,532,633 active sites.
• Active sites peaked at 217,673,119 in June 2026 before easing to 216,702,733 in July.
• Hostnames added 415,761,089 between January 2024 and July 2026, while active sites added 24,326,973 across the same period.
• The July 2026 survey alone added 5.5 million sites, 1.2 million domains and 118,277 web-facing computers.
• Active sites fell by 970,386 between the June 2026 peak and the July 2026 reading.

By the numbers: Netcraft’s own series shows hostnames adding 415,761,089 between January 2024 and July 2026 while active sites added 24,326,973. Seventeen new hostnames appeared for every new active site over that window, which is why a rising billion-scale count says more about hosting than about publishing.

How many websites are created every day?

Netcraft’s July 2026 net increase of 5.5 million sites works out to roughly 177,000 additional responding hostnames per day. Verisign’s quarterly increase of 9.1 million registrations across all top-level domains works out to about 100,000 additional domain name registrations per day.

Recent Developments

• July 2026: Netcraft’s survey received responses from 1,494,915,628 sites, with OpenResty gaining 39.5 million sites in a single month.
• Q2 2026: Verisign reported that the second quarter of 2026 closed with 401.6 million domain name registrations, up 2.3% from the first quarter.
• June 2026: Netcraft’s active-site count reached 217,673,119, above every other month in the January 2024 to July 2026 window.
• 2025: The HTTP Archive Web Almanac put the median mobile home page at 2.6 MB, up 8.4% from 2.4 MB in 2024.
• December 2025: Cloudflare reported that global Internet traffic grew 19% across 2025.
• December 2025: Cloudflare recorded post-quantum encrypted human web traffic nearly doubling throughout 2025, from 29% at the start of the year to 52% in early December.

Domain Name Registrations by Type

• Registrations across all top-level domains rose by 9.1 million, or 2.3%, against the first quarter of 2026.
• The .com domain name base totaled 166.6 million registrations as of June 30, 2026.
• The .net domain name base totaled 12.5 million registrations on the same date.
• Country-code top-level domains held 148.6 million registrations, an increase of 2.3 million, or 1.6%, in the first quarter.
• New .com and .net registrations totaled 12.7 million in the second quarter of 2026, against 10.4 million a year earlier.
• The top 10 country-code domains as of June 30, 2026 were .cn, .de, .uk, .ru, .nl, .br, .fr, .au, .in and .eu.
• Top-level domains outside .com, .net and the country codes hold the remaining 73.9 million registrations.

Source: Verisign Domain Name Industry Brief, Q2 2026

A registration is a commercial contract with a renewal date. That makes it the most stable of the three counts, and the least informative about what sits at the address.

Top-Level Domain Share Across Websites

• .com is used as a top-level domain by 43.6% of all websites.
• .org and .de each account for 3.9% of websites.
• Brazil’s .br reaches 3.1%, and Russia’s .ru 2.8%.
• The .uk domain sits at 2.4%, ahead of .net at 2.2%.
• Japan’s .jp accounts for 2.0%, with .it and .fr each at 1.9%.
• No top-level domain outside the top two exceeds 4% of measured websites.
• The .com domain alone outweighs the next seven top-level domains combined by a factor of 2.1.

Content Management System Share of All Websites

• 30.9% of the websites use none of the content management systems that W3Techs monitors.
• WordPress is used by 40.7% of all websites, a content management system market share of 58.9%.
• Shopify reaches 5.3% of all websites, a 7.7% share of the CMS market.
• Wix is used by 4.2% of websites and Squarespace by 2.5%.
• Joomla holds 1.1% of all websites, with Webflow and Tilda at 0.8% each.
• Drupal and Duda each account for 0.7% of websites.
• 69.1% of all websites run a monitored content management system.

Two of the seven platforms above are storefront builders, which is why the web-wide mix reads differently from the mix in E-commerce alone. Sites running no monitored CMS cover hand-built pages, static generators, and the parked hostnames already flagged above.

Web Server Software Share and Monthly Movement

• OpenResty gained 39.5 million sites, a rise of 49.1%, in the July 2026 survey alone.
• OpenResty now accounts for 8.02% of sites seen by Netcraft, a gain of 2.62 percentage points.
• Cloudflare made the next largest gain at 7.9 million sites, a rise of 3.28%.
• nginx recorded the largest loss at 9.8 million sites, down 3.13%, reducing its share to 20.4%.
• Google’s site count fell by 1.3 million, a decline of 1.57%.
• nginx’s share fell by 0.74 percentage points in a single monthly survey.

Source: Netcraft Web Server Survey, July 2026

No population of real publishers migrates that many sites onto one server in a month. Swings of that size come from hosting estates reclassified in bulk. That is a hostname census measuring configuration, not the web.

HTTPS and Encryption Adoption Across Websites

• Default protocol HTTPS is used by 90.0% of all websites.
• The share of human-generated web traffic that is post-quantum encrypted nearly doubled through 2025, from 29% at the start of the year to 52% in early December.
• 6% of global traffic over Cloudflare’s network was mitigated by its systems as potentially malicious or for customer-defined reasons.
• More than 5% of email messages analyzed by Cloudflare were found to be malicious.
• Globally, less than a third of dual-stack requests were made over IPv6, while in India, over two-thirds were.
• 10.0% of websites still do not serve HTTPS by default.

The remaining tenth is the part worth watching. A site still on plain HTTP is usually unmaintained, not deliberately configured. The Cloudflare network view adds the transport layer a site-level survey cannot see. Both readings agree that encryption is now the default rather than the exception.

Website Statistics by Content Language

• English is used by 49.5% of all the websites whose content language is known.
• Spanish follows at 6.0% and German at 5.9%.
• Japanese accounts for 4.9% of websites and French 4.5%.
• Portuguese reaches 4.1%, ahead of Russian at 3.4%.
• Chinese is the content language of 1.3% of measured websites.
• Arabic and Ukrainian each account for 0.6% of websites.

The language table measures published pages, not audiences. Chinese is the clearest example. Much of that activity sits on platforms and apps rather than separately counted sites. The same split shows up in platform-native video, where the audience for TikTok never registers as a website at all.

Web Page Weight and Performance Statistics

• In July 2015, the median mobile home page was 845 KB, and by July 2025 the same median page was 2,362 KB.
• That decade brought a 202.8% increase on mobile, against a 110.2% increase for the median desktop home page.
• The median mobile home page is 2.6 MB, growing 8.4% from 2.4 MB in 2024.
• The median desktop page size reached 2.9 MB in 2025, up 7.3% from 2024’s median of 2.7 MB.
• The median desktop page used 1,059 KB of images, against 911 KB on mobile.
• Images accounted for the most bytes on both mobile and desktop, followed by JavaScript and fonts.
• Desktop pages carry 148 KB more image bytes than mobile pages at the median.

Worth noting: The HTTP Archive puts pages using JavaScript at 98.1%, and images ahead of every other content type by bytes on both mobile and desktop. Weight has therefore grown through richer media rather than through code, which matters because image bytes are the easiest category to reduce without changing what a page does.

What are good metrics for a website?

The measurable properties that primary sources actually track are page weight, protocol, and crawler exposure. The HTTP Archive’s median mobile page of 2.6 MB gives a benchmark to sit under. Default HTTPS at 90.0% of websites sets the protocol baseline. Bingbot generated 6% of Verified Bot traffic through 2025, which is a reminder that indexing coverage is a metric too.

Bot and AI Crawler Traffic Hitting Websites

• Googlebot was responsible for more than a quarter of Verified Bot traffic during 2025.
• OpenAI’s GPTBot was the next most active bot, originating about 7.5% of Verified Bot traffic.
• Microsoft’s Bingbot generated 6% of Verified Bot traffic across the year, with relatively stable activity.
• AI user action crawling increased by over 15x in 2025.
• 40% of global bot traffic came from the United States, with Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud originating a quarter of global bot traffic.
• Crawl volume from dual-purpose Googlebot dwarfed other AI bots and crawlers.

Source: Cloudflare Radar 2025 Year in Review

Googlebot crawls for search indexing and AI training at once. The old split between traffic that sends visitors and traffic that trains a model no longer maps onto separate user agents. That collapse is what makes crawler behavior an SEO question rather than a purely operational one.

Global Web Traffic and Website Security Signals

• Global Internet traffic grew 19% in 2025, with significant growth starting in August.
• More than half of request traffic comes from mobile devices in 117 countries and regions.
• iOS devices generated 35% of mobile device traffic globally, and more than half of device traffic in many countries.
• Almost half of the 174 major Internet outages observed around the world in 2025 were due to government-directed regional and national shutdowns.
• 6% of global traffic over Cloudflare’s network was mitigated as potentially malicious or for customer-defined reasons.

Source: Cloudflare Radar 2025 Year in Review

Mobile majority status reframes what a website has to be before anyone reaches it. The same shift drives mCommerce volumes, where the device that loads the page and the device that completes the purchase have converged.

How do I see the statistics of a website?

Public, free datasets cover most of what an outside observer can know about a site. Netcraft’s monthly Web Server Survey publishes site, domain, and web-facing computer counts along with server software shares. W3Techs publishes usage shares for content management systems, and states that its reports are updated daily.

Traffic and performance sit with two other sources. Cloudflare Radar covers traffic, bots, security, and connectivity patterns observed across its network. The HTTP Archive Web Almanac publishes page weight distributions by device and content type. Per-site visitor counts are a different question, and no free primary source publishes them, which is why those figures trace to paid panel estimates.

Conclusion

Website statistics only work once the counts are labelled. Netcraft’s 1,494,915,628 responding hostnames, Verisign’s 401.6 million registered domains and Netcraft’s 216,702,733 active sites are three correct answers to three different questions. The gap between the first and the third is the single most useful number here.

For anyone sizing a market, the active-site figure is the honest denominator. It has grown far more slowly than the headline. For anyone building a site, the baseline is default HTTPS, a page near two and a half megabytes, plus an audience of crawlers.