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Metrics on the Top 100 Most Visited Sites

Planted 02020-06-21

Looking for how your site stacks up against the top 100?

I pulled the top 100 most visited sites by organic traffic from Ahrefs data published May 12, 2020 and then measured the top 100 most visited sites for

  • PageSpeed Performance Score: a score determined by running Lighthouse to collect and analyze lab data about the page.
  • First Contentful Paint (FCP): marks the time at which the first text or image is painted.
  • Speed Index: shows how quickly the contents of a page are visibly populated.
  • Time to Interative (TTI): the amount of time it takes for the page to become fully interactive.
  • Average Title Length: The average length of the text displayed on SERPs as the clickable headline for a given result.
  • Average Meta Description Length: The average length of the text displayed on SERPs as the description for a given result.
  • Average Word Count: The average length of all β€˜words’ inside the body tag.

Here’s what I found.

Overview

Metric Averages:

  • PageSpeed Performance Score: 37.4
  • First Contentful Paint (FCP): 2.9s
  • Speed Index: 8.7s
  • Time to Interative (TTI): 19.7s
  • Average Title Length: 44
  • Average Meta Description Length: 146
  • Average Page Size: 301 kb
  • Average Word Count: 1,144
Uncategorized performance distribution for PageSpeed, FCP, Speed Index, and TTI.
Uncategorized performance distribution for PageSpeed, FCP, Speed Index, and TTI.

To get a little more granular I decided put each of the top 100 into a category.

  • Business (e.g. Apple.com, Chase.com)
  • Directory (e.g. bbb.org, indeed.com)
  • Ecommerce (e.g. amazon.com, ebay.com)
  • Landing (e.g. hulu.com, linkedin.com)
  • Login (e.g. facebook.com, quora.com)
  • News (e.g. nytimes.com, forbes.com)
  • Webapp (e.g. youtube.com, apartments.com)
  • Wiki (e.g. genius.com, mayoclinic.com)
category-distribution.png
Category distribution.

Category PageSpeed

Median Category Scores: (Higher is better)

  • Business: 41
  • Directory: 49
  • Ecommerce: 36
  • Landing: 59
  • Login: 47
  • News: 23
  • Webapp: 34
  • Wiki: 25
category-pagespeed.png
Category PageSpeed distribution.

I find it saddening to see News sites performing the worst. Do note: this metric is not useful for determining actual site performance. Landing pages being the highest makes sense. With Directory and Login pages not too far behind.

Category Title and Meta Description Length

Title Length Median:

  • Business: 60
  • Directory: 36
  • Ecommerce: 44
  • Landing: 47.5
  • Login: 20.5
  • News: 55.5
  • Webapp: 48
  • Wiki: 35.5

Meta Description Length Median:

  • Business: 144
  • Directory: 113
  • Ecommerce: 154
  • Landing: 136
  • Login: 150
  • News: 170
  • Webapp: 154
  • Wiki: 153
length-distribution.png
Categorized title and meta description length distribution.

Category Page Size

Median Page Sizes (kb):

  • Business: 119
  • Directory: 175
  • Ecommerce: 229
  • Landing: 93
  • Login: 121
  • News: 349
  • Webapp: 264
  • Wiki: 119
pagesize-distribution.png
Categorized page size distribution.

Median Word Count

  • Business: 891
  • Directory: 865
  • Ecommerce: 873
  • Landing: 446
  • Login: 121
  • News: 1,385
  • Webapp: 757
  • Wiki: 863
wordcount-distribution.png
Categorized Word Count distribution.

With Web Vitals becoming ranking factors in 2021 I want to collect data on LCP, FID, and CLS at some point . Hopefully those performance numbers will improve in the future, let’s make a better web.

If you see a mistake or have a question, feel free to reach out through this site or on Twitter.