When we started doing web design at Türk SEM, something made us curious. How many sites go live around the world in one minute? The exact number of websites keeps changing every second, but there are over 1 billion sites on the web worldwide (1,106,671,903 according to Netcraft’s June 2023 Web Server Survey, against 1,146,976,964 in June 2022).
The 1 billion website mark was reached in September 2014 and then it fell back below 1 billion for a year and a half.
The total number of websites on the internet only reached 1 billion again in March 2016. As you read this article today the number is still moving.
1,106,671,903
There are currently close to 1.11 billion websites in the world. Of those, 18% are active and 82% are not.
| 201,898,446 websites active | 252,000 new websites created every day |
| 10,500 new websites created every hour | new websites created every minute |
| 3 new websites created every second | 2,000 + new websites by the time you finish reading this article |
Website Numbers Year by Year
| YEAR | All websites | Active sites |
|---|---|---|
| January 2023 | 1,132,268,801 | 202,900,724 |
| January 2022 | 1,167,715,133 | 198,988,100 |
| January 2021 | 1,197,982,359 | 199,533,484 |
| January 2020 | 1,295,973,827 | 189,000,000 |
| January 2019 | 1,518,207,412 | 182,185,876 |
| January 2018 | 1,805,260,010 | 171,648,771 |
| January 2017 | 1,800,047,111 | 172,353,235 |
| January 2016 | 906,616,188 | 170,258,872 |
| January 2015 | 876,812,666 | 177,127,427 |
| January 2014 | 861,379,152 | 180,067,270 |
300 of those active sites came out of work done by Türk SEM.
How Many Sites Are Active
There may be more than a billion websites, but not all of them are active.
Only 18% of all the websites in the world are active and being used in some way.
The remaining 82% of all websites are not active. Most of them are parked domains or something along those lines.
As of June 2023 there were 201,898,446 active websites in the world and 904,773,457 inactive ones.
Which means the total number of active sites is five times smaller than the total number of inactive ones.
That is a large gap.
And then there are the websites that never get updated.
So the real number of genuinely active, working sites could be much smaller still.
Next time somebody asks you how many websites there are on the internet, remember to ask whether they mean all websites or only the active ones.
As this section shows, the difference between those two can be enormous.
