Internet & Website Statistics 2026

CodexFuse Team · 2026-11-01T05:23:04.035Z · 6 min read min read

43 internet and website statistics for 2026 with original sources: global users, websites and domains, mobile access, infrastructure, speeds, and the digital economy.

The internet crossed another milestone in 2026: more than six billion people are now online, mobile phones carry the majority of web traffic, and the number of websites has pushed past 1.4 billion. Yet the headline totals hide a quieter story — only a small fraction of those websites are actively maintained, more than half of all web traffic comes from bots rather than humans, and over two billion people still have no internet access at all. Below are 43 internet and website statistics for 2026, each attributed to its original research source — covering global users, websites and domains, mobile access, infrastructure, speed, and the digital economy they power.

Global internet users in 2026

There were 6.12 billion internet users worldwide in April 2026, equal to 73.8% of the global population (DataReportal, Digital 2026 Mid-Year Global Update).
The online population grew by 59 million users in the twelve months to April 2026, a 1.0% increase — though reporting delays mean the true growth rate is higher (DataReportal).
Internet use has grown from under 400 million users in 2000 to more than 6 billion in 2025 (DataReportal).
2.2 billion people remain offline, most of them in Southern Asia and Central Africa (ITU, Facts and Figures 2025).
The digital divide is still stark: 94% of people in high-income countries use the internet, versus 23% in low-income countries and 36% in Africa (ITU, Facts and Figures 2025).
Internet penetration reaches 93% in North America, one of the highest regional rates in the world (Statista).
China has the most internet users of any country, at almost 1.3 billion, after revised national figures; India is second with more than 1 billion people online (DataReportal, citing CNNIC data).
The average internet user spends 33 hours and 13 minutes per week consuming online media — about 4 hours and 45 minutes a day (DataReportal).

How many websites exist in 2026

The answer depends on what you count — but by every measure, the web keeps growing.

Netcraft's July 2026 Web Server Survey received responses from 1.49 billion websites across 305 million unique domains (Netcraft).
The web has grown roughly 75-fold since 2000, when about 17 million websites existed (Netcraft).
Only 15% of all websites are actively maintained — the other 85% sit dormant, parked, or abandoned (Netcraft).
Of the roughly 1.34 billion websites Netcraft tracked earlier in 2026, about 201 million showed signs of regular maintenance and fresh content (Netcraft).
Active websites are increasing at 5% year over year, outpacing the growth of inactive domains (Netcraft).
An estimated 1.25 million new websites are created every day, roughly 37.5 million per month (Netcraft).
The world's first website launched in 1991, when Tim Berners-Lee put the first page online at CERN to explain the World Wide Web project (CERN).

Domain names and addresses

There are 368 million domain names registered worldwide across all top-level domains (Hostinger Domain Name Statistics).
Domain registrations grew by 6.1 million year over year, a 1.7% annual growth rate (Hostinger Domain Name Statistics).
.com remains the dominant extension with 157.2 million registrations (Hostinger Domain Name Statistics).
Verisign counted 179.1 million .com and .net registrations at the end of Q2 2026, up 5.1% in a year (Verisign).
More than 1,200 new generic top-level domains are now available, from .tech to .store to .blog (Hostinger Domain Name Statistics).
Google is the world's most visited website, serving as the main gateway through which billions of people discover other sites (Hostinger).

How websites are built and secured

WordPress powers 40.2% of all websites globally, making it the dominant web publishing platform by an enormous margin (W3Techs, October 2026).
49.2% of websites publish in English, the web's leading language by a wide margin (Statista).
HTTPS is the default protocol on 90.1% of websites (W3Techs).
Cloudflare leads web server software among the world's active websites with a 19.41% share, ahead of nginx, Apache, and Google (Netcraft).
Google's server software powers more than 21.3 million active websites, making it one of the major providers behind regularly updated sites (Netcraft).

Mobile internet in 2026

Mobile devices accounted for 59% of global web traffic in September 2026 (StatCounter).
A Statista-based reading puts mobile's share even higher at 63% of all web traffic when tablets are excluded — either way, the phone is the primary window onto the web (Statista, via Hostinger).
96.2% of internet users go online with a mobile phone at least some of the time (DataReportal).
There are 5.83 billion unique mobile phone users — 70.4% of the world's population — and 7.64 billion smartphones in use (DataReportal).
5G covered 55% of the world's population in 2025 (ITU).
5G subscriptions reached nearly 3.3 billion by June 2026 (Ericsson Mobility Report).
Mobile broadband traffic averaged 15.3 GB per subscription per month in 2025 (ITU).

Infrastructure, speed, and traffic quality

Bots generated 53% of all web traffic in 2025 — up from 51% the year before (Imperva, 2026 Bad Bot Report).
Bad bots — scrapers, spam, credential stuffing, DDoS — accounted for 40% of all web traffic, leaving humans with just 47% (Imperva).
Global median download speeds reached 129.7 Mbps on fixed broadband and 109.1 Mbps on mobile in August 2026 (Ookla Speedtest Global Index).
Between 46% and 51% of Google's users reached Google over IPv6 in late August 2026, driven largely by mobile carriers (Google IPv6 Statistics) — you can check whether your own connection uses it with CodexFuse's free IPv6 address lookup tool.
The internet runs on more than 600 active and planned submarine cables, with over 1.5 million kilometers of cable in service (TeleGeography).
30.8% of all websites use a reverse proxy or CDN, and Cloudflare alone serves 26.3% of all websites (W3Techs).

The internet economy

Global advertising spend reached $1.16 trillion in 2025, with digital channels taking 74.4% — about $860 billion (Statista, via DataReportal).
Search advertising was the largest single ad category at $352 billion in 2025 — just under $1 billion a day (Statista, via DataReportal).
Consumers were projected to spend $3.66 trillion on online goods in 2025, up 13% from 2024 (Statista, via DataReportal).
Google's parent Alphabet reported $294.7 billion in advertising revenue for 2025, while Meta reported $196.2 billion — together capturing more than half of all digital ad spending (Alphabet Investor Relations; Meta Investor Relations).

Sources

Every figure above is attributed to its original research source and dated to the report it comes from. Research firms measure the internet differently — site counts, user totals, and traffic shares vary between surveys — so figures from different sources will not always align perfectly.