The Average Website

The average website receives about 3 visits a day, according to a Google benchmark report a few years ago. This is the mean of enormous numbers of websites around the world. HubSpot recently shared data from their clients — people who are using their websites for business and making efforts to increase traffic — showing that small businesses with 5 or fewer workers have about 90-150 visits a week, or 10 times the global average. Traffic increases with company size, but their mean traffic didn’t hit 1,000 a week till they got to companies with 50 or more workers.

These numbers may seem small, but we see websites which have been live for years which still receive just a few visits a day.

When I first started working with SEO, as an in-house SEO for a brick and click store, I really wanted to know these numbers. We were at 3 visits a day when I started. When I got our website to 30 visits a day, I could see that this was good progress — ten times what we’d started with — but I didn’t know that this was actually above average for a company our size. For all I knew, our competitors might have had 300 visits a day. Or 3,000. I didn’t have enough information to know.

So having some idea of the average traffic to the average website can help you to develop realistic goals for your own traffic.

But then what do you do with that information? Relax because you’re average or above average? Worry because you’re not? Stop when you hit the average?

Consider looking instead at growth.

We found, by checking a large number of websites that had ongoing management and comparing them to sites that did not, that the average year over year growth of set-and-forget websites was -.17% — essentially no change.

The average growth for managed websites over the same time period?

51.6%.

The range was from -30.43% for one of the set it and forget it websites to +175.44% for one of the sites we managed.

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Our experience with our lab sites confirmed through experiment what we had previously discovered by observation: a good website that is launched and then ignored can expect to see little to no growth in traffic.

The chart below shows the traffic over the life of one of the websites we manage. We see other patterns of growth, but we generally see continuing growth over time, as shown. At some points along this journey, this website could have been called average. Now, it is distinctly above average. Are we ending our work or expecting it to stop growing? Not at all. Your site traffic may or may not be average, but our experience shows that continuing growth is typical… as long as you make strategic effort toward that growth.