Whilst normality didn’t quite resume this year, things in the world of digital rolled on as usual. Well almost as usual.
We had the Robinhood/GameStop stock saga, Activision Blizzard being outed for their highly toxic work culture, the Apple scanning iPhone images backlash, the billionaire space race, NFTs, and virtually every big tech company facing questions over privacy and responsibility.
But on the positive side, we had Reddit WallStreetBets donating vast sums to The Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund International, and other charities. We saw people coming together via the internet to do good deeds both large and small, like this struggling independent bookshop receiving a flood of orders after a bad day, and this care home being inundated with postcards for residents with dementia.
Also uplifting, we continued to have a constant stream of cute animal stories and photos. From Otters photobombing wedding proposals, to delightfully chonky bears, the internet provided.
But back to industry related things, here is a roundup of some of the more interesting digital industry stats, news and releases from 2021.
WordPress
As is only right for a WordPress Agency, let’s start with the world’s favourite CMS.
The platform is now 18 years old, so can officially have a pint here in the UK.
This year we saw 2 new core version releases with 5.7 ‘Esperanza’ in March, and 5.8 ‘Tatum’ in July. WordPress 5.9 which was slated for late 2021 release has been delayed, and will appear in January 2022.
5.9 is a highly anticipated release, moving forward with full site editing. This began with 5.8, and 5.9 promises to bring it to fruition.
Releases in 2021
These are the releases from this year, including the regular maintenance and security updates.
- WordPress 5.6.1 Maintenance Release – February 3rd 2021
- WordPress 5.6.2 Maintenance Release – February 22nd 2021
- WordPress 5.7 “Esperanza” – March 9th 2021
- WordPress 5.7.1 Security and Maintenance Release – April 15th 2021
- WordPress 5.7.2 Security Release – May 13th 2021
- WordPress 5.8 “Tatum” – July 20th 2021
- WordPress 5.8.1 Security and Maintenance Release – September 9th 2021
- WordPress 5.8.2 Security and Maintenance Release – November 10th 2021
Marketshare
WordPress’s marketshare has continued to grow in 2021. It currently has a 65.1% CMS marketshare (up from 64.4% last year), and is behind 43% of all know websites (40% last year). WooCommerce makes up 40.9% of online stores worldwide.
Plugin Popularity
There are now more than 59,707 plugins available through the WordPress plugin directory, up from 58,000 last year.
As we always suggest, be careful when selecting plugins for your website, selecting trusted and regularly maintained options. Remember that keeping plugins up-to-date is very important in maintaining your site’s functionality and security.
A number of the most popular and well rated plugins are among our favourites too (besides the ones we custom build for our clients).
For example:
- WooCommerce – Is currently on version 6.0.0 and has clocked up an enormous 163,482,194 downloads to date (up from 119,892,170 last year – a 27% increase).
- Yoast SEO – Is currently on version 17.8 with a huge 384,713,525 downloads in total so far (up from 290,875,377 last year – a 24% increase).
- Sucuri Security – We use their full security platform, but their plugin is currently on version 1.8.30 with over 9,330,060 downloads (up from 6,580,784 last year – a 29% increase).
- Elementor – Is currently on version 3.5.1 with 147,006,492 downloads as of writing this (up from 84,723,160 last year – a 42% increase).
- Advanced Custom Fields – Is currently on version 5.11.4, with a healthy 25,938,287 downloads at this time (no figure for last year).
Internet Use, Devices and Browsers
Use
Globally there are believed to be 4.66 billion active internet users in the world (nearly 60% of the global population). 92.6% of these users access the internet via mobile devices.
In the UK, there are 63.54 million internet users.
Device Split
The current global split between devices used to access the internet is as follows:
- Desktop – 43.48% (down from 44.2% last year)
- Mobile – 54.04% (up from 52.9% last year)
- Tablet – 2.48% (down from 2.8% last year)
Web Browser Popularity
Across device types, the current browser market share looks like this:
- Chrome has 64.0% (up from 63.5% last year)
- Safari has 19.2% (no change)
- Firefox has 3.9% (up from 3.7% last year)
- Samsung Internet has 2.8% (down from 3.4% last year)
- Edge has 4.1% (up from 3.0% last year)
- Opera has 2.3% (up from 2.1% last year)
Browser Version Market Share
Within those browser popularity statistics, these are the versions of those browsers by market share as of November 2021.
- Chrome for Android – 35.24% (up from 34.5% last year)
- Chrome 95.0 – 14.45% (new version since last year)
- Safari iPhone – 13.96% (up from 13.5% last year)
- Chrome 96.9 – (new version since last year)
- Edge 95 – 2.93% (new version since last year)
- Firefox 94.0 – 2.55% (new version since last year)
Search Engines
Search Engine Market Share
The search engine landscape is still heavily dominated by Google, they have experienced a small drop this year, whilst Bing, Baidu, and Yandex have experience small climbs.
- Google – 91.4% (down from 92.1% last year)
- Bing – 3.1% (up from 2.8% last year)
- Yahoo! – 1.5% (no change)
- Baidu – 1.7% (up from 1.1% last year)
- DuckDuckGo – 0.6% (no change)
- Yandex – 0.9% (up from 0.5% last year)
Outages
2021 was a year of many outages across the internet, impacting users and businesses to varying degrees.
- In April, Google had an outage of around 4 hours, affecting many of its tools and services including Drive, Sheets and Docs. This obviously had a big impact on businesses who make use of these tools everyday.
- In June, the Fastly outage wreaked havoc on a big section of the internet, with Amazon, Spotify, eBay, Reddit, news and government sites, along with a great deal more returning 503 errors.
- In October Facebook/Meta experienced a big service outage across their platforms. Twitter briefly experienced a huge uplift in active users.
- In December AWS (Amazon Web Services) had issues on three occasions, taking down sites and causing issues for thew likes of Disney Plus, Slack, Google, McDonalds, Playstation Network, Twitch and Hulu, among others.
Social Media
Social Platform Popularity
Social Media platforms still dominate, ever expanding, buying each other out, and adding remarkably similar features…
2021 included:
Facebook rebranding to Meta amid a lot of bad press about misinformation on the platform, the addition of reels, and an attempt to break into the game streaming space.
Twitter and Facebook both banned Trump.
Twitter released Twitter Blue, prompts to try and dissuade users from getting into heated arguments, and rolled out their updated misinformation labels.
Youtube removed the dislike counter.
WhatsApp introduced ‘disappearing messages’.
Instagram added a new dashboard for business and creator accounts, collabs, and promised to tackle racial abuse on the platform.
Here’s a breakdown of marketshare for some of the major platforms.
- Facebook – 74.0%
- Twitter – 7.7%
- Pinterest – 7.7%
- Instagram – 4.5%
- YouTube – 3.9%
- Reddit – 1.0%
In terms of active users, the list looks like this.
- Facebook – 2,895 million
- YouTube – 2,291 million
- WhatsApp – 2,000 million
- Instagram – 1,393 million
- Facebook Messenger – 1,300 million
- TikTok – 1,000 million
- Snapchat – 538 million
- Pinterest – 454 million
- Twitter – 463 million
- Reddit – 430 million
- Quora – 300 million
Design
There are many important factors which determine how we approach web design. Let’s take a look at some 2021 stats.
Screen Resolution
Screen resolution is pretty important in the design world. We need to stay on top of the most used resolutions so we can make responsive websites which display well across a multitude of devices.
Here are the screen resolutions that were dominant in 2021.
- 1920×1080 – 9.61% (down from 9.68% last year)
- 1366×768 – 7.87% (down from 9.3% last year)
- 360×800 – 4.73% (new to the top list this year)
- 360×640 – 4.36% (down from 7.9% last year)
- 414×896 – 4.34% (up from 4.0% last year)
- 1536×864 – 4.11% (up from 3.9% last year)
With new models coming from Apple and a variety of new Android devices on the market, including the Google Pixel 6, and folding screens from Samsung and others, will we see a big change in trends in 2022?
Whether you’re a Google fan, or think they are the devil, they have an enormous impact on how we interact with the internet, and how we create and market our websites.
It has been a busy year for those in SEO, with what felt like never-ending algorithm updates, releases and changes to stay on top of. Let’s have a look at some of the main Google news and releases from 2021.
MUM
We mentioned BERT in last years stats roundup post. Well this year came MUM (Multitask Unified Model). 1,000 times more powerful than BERT, MUM is an AI technology which aims to help Google Search to deliver the most relevant, accurate, and helpful answers to complex and nuanced queries.
Core Web Vitals
Core Web Vitals finally rolled out as part of the Page Experience Update between June and August 2021, adding to the mobile page experience signals they use in helping to rank websites.
This page experience update will be coming to desktop in 2022, currently marked for a February rollout.
Search Console
It has been a big year for Search Console with numerous updates and new reports, along with Search Console Insights. There is also more to come, with a Tweet from Google Search Central this November promising small changes to be implemented over the coming months to improve user experience and accessibility.
We’ve also had a few Search Console issues and reporting discrepancies, but on the whole these have been dealt with pretty swiftly.
Some of the new Search Console reports and updates have included:
- Page Experience report – tying in with the rollout of Core Web Vitals.
- Google News Performance – within the performance report.
- An enhanced Associations page.
- Improved data filtering in Performance reports.
Return Of Request Indexing
This one brought a little joy into our lives. The sometime missing Request Indexing option in the URL Inspection tool returned, allowing us to request prioritised indexing for single pages in Search Console.
Broad Core Algorithm Updates
Although Google constantly make tweaks to their search algorithm without the need to notify us, the Broad Core Updates are larger named updates, which they do let us know about. The larger the update, the more potential impact it could have on rankings.
The Core Updates usually happen a couple of times a year, but more unusually this year we had 2 announced for consecutive months.
I’ve embedded Tweets or linked to articles so that you can find out more about each update, in case you missed them at the time.
November 2021 Core Update
July 2021 Core Update
June 2021 Core Update
Other Confirmed Algorithm Updates
Alongside the Core updates we had a range of other confirmed and named updates from Google this year. Some went smoothly, and some caused quite a fuss.
Product Reviews Update – December 2021
Local Search Update – November 2021
Spam Update – November 2021
Page Title Rewrites – August 2021
This update caused all manner of controversy, with SEOs taking to Twitter in their masses to share the bizarre results that were showing in the SERP.
After significant feedback, and many examples where title rewrites made them far from user friendly, Google made some further changes in September.
Link Spam Update – July 2021
Spam Updates x2 – June 2021
Page Experience Update – June 2021
Product Reviews Update – April 2021
Passage Indexing (US/English) — February 2021
If my SEO nerding hasn’t sent you running for the hills yet, don’t worry, I’m wrapping up now.
What industry related news or stats have you found most fascinating this year?
I’d also like to take this opportunity to wish everyone a happy Christmas period, and hopefully a better 2022.
