It’s that time of year again! No, I don’t mean Christmas. I mean the month of the ‘year in review’ blog posts. Here is ours.
2020 has been no typical year for most of us, with a global pandemic changing life for people across the globe, and a knock on economic recession. This kind of catastrophic global event has been a first for the internet age.
Whilst most of us can’t wait to see the back of this year, it has been interesting to see the part the internet has played in 2020. Many have had to reassess their way of life, or their business models, embracing digital like never before.
With large scale home-working, giving people access to up-to-date information, online commerce and elections, the focus has been on digital more than ever before. Digital readiness has been a defining factor in whether many businesses were able to survive the year, with traditional brick and mortar businesses being hit hard.
It hasn’t all been negative though. We’ve seen some businesses thrive online, workers achieve better work/life balance, amazing amounts of charity fundraising, communities using digital to look out for their most vulnerable members, and the likes of Marcus Rashford using his digital presence to highlight injustices, and lobby the government into making important changes for young people living in poverty.
And of course, there has been the all important steady stream of cat pictures, bringing us some levity.
With all this in mind, grab a cuppa and let’s take a look at some of the most interesting web stats for 2020.
Let’s start with WordPress, as it’s pretty important to us as a WordPress agency.
The platform is now 17 years old and unrecognisable from its early days. It now has the scalability and flexibility to allow developers to create custom web solutions that can rival any enterprise level product.
What’s more, it is still licence free, and had 805 developers from across the globe, contribute to its latest version 5.5 – released in October 2020. Not many other platforms can boast that level of development resource.
This year we saw 3 new core version releases with 5.4 ‘Adderley’ in March, 5.5 ‘Eckstine’ in August, and 5.6 ‘Simone’ – along with regular expected maintenance and security updates.
WordPress currently has a 64.4% CMS marketshare, and is behind 40% of all websites. WooCommerce is behind 22% of the top million eCommerce sites worldwide.
Clearly we’re not alone in our love of WordPress!
There are currently more than 58,000 plugins available through the WordPress plugin directory, with no sign of things slowing down.
Not all are created equally, so it is important to take care when selecting the plugins you make use of, and keeping trusted plugins up-to-date is very important in maintaining your site functionality and security.
Many of the most downloaded and highest rated plugins are among our favourites too (besides the ones we custom build for our clients).
For example:
Many of these plugins help to power the websites you know and love.
Now let’s move on to some general stats on internet usage, device types and web browsers. As these are the key metrics which decide how we as businesses operate online.
There are over 7.5 billion people on the planet, and over 4.6 billion of them are active web users. That’s a pretty mind blowing figure.
The current global split between devices used to access the internet is as follows:
Mobile and desktop are neck and neck. This is why businesses mustn’t lag behind in making their websites accessible and user friendly for mobile visitors. Be aware of device split on your website, and how important being mobile friendly is for organic search.
Across all device type, the current browser market share among the biggest players looks like this:
Within that, these are the versions of those browsers by market share.
It is important to keep your web browser up-to-date to receive the best experience online. Old versions may not be able to render websites as they should be seen.
If you’re a big fan of internet statistics, we recommend you check out Internet Live Stats.
The reason our websites can be found, and why we all put so much effort into SEO. Let’s look at the current Search Engine dcf.
With such a massive share of the market, it is easy to see why it is so important to follow Google guidance on search engine optimisation, and stay up-to-date with their algorithm updates and additions.
61% of all searches using Google are carried out on mobile. This is why Google is heavily invested in mobile search and usability. Once mobile became the dominant device in search, the introduced mobile first indexing, and performance of sites on mobile is an important ranking factor. So businesses cannot afford to ignore the user experience their websites give on mobile.
There are many important factors which determine how we approach web design. Lets take a look at some 2020 stats, and news which have a bearing on design.
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 devices.
Here are the screen resolutions currently dominant in 2020.
With the Apple iPhone 12 and iPhone 12 mini being released, with resolutions of 2532×1170 & 2340×1080 respectively, will we see a big change in trends in 2021?
Love them or hate them, Google has an enormous impact on how we interact with the internet, and how we create and market websites.
Let’s have a look at some of the top Google news and releases from 2020.
Core Web Vitals
Google announced the coming of Core Web Vitals as key ranking factors in their algorithm. Originally due to become part of the algorithm in 2020, due to covid and to give people time to prepare, Google announced an extension, and it is now earmarked for May 2021.
BERT
BERT originally became big news at the tail end of 2019, with news that the natural language processing neural network (say that three times quickly!), was to be introduced to search, to help Google deliver better search results, by understanding context and natural language in search queries.
Initially it was only rolled out on 1 in 10 of search queries in English, but as of October 2020, Google have now said it is now used in almost every single English language query. This could have a huge impact on how we optimise our websites for search, moving away from the traditional keyword focus.
Analytics 4
In October we found out about the release of Google Analytics 4. The latest GA version packed full of new features. These include cross device tracking, new insights driven by AI, codeless event tracking, better integration with other Google tools, such as Google Ads (formally Google AdWords), and better data control making life easier for users from countries with data regulations like GDPR.
Although a ‘new version’, Google recommends having your sites set up in both the existing Universal Analytic, and the new Analytics 4.
So there it is, my roundup of 2020 stats and digital news. What industry related news or stats have you found most fascinating this year? Let me know.
Also, I’d like to take this opportunity to wish everyone a happy festive period, and here’s to a better 2021.
Another year has flown by, which can only mean one thing. Another roundup post!
We will be operating as normal throughout the coming lockdown period.
Some tools we recommend for making remote working work for you.
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