Introduction

There is no denying that 2020 has been a tough year for many businesses and their websites. The pandemic has thrown down challenges not seen in modern times.

It hasn’t been universally bad for businesses though. Some sectors have fared better than others. In some badly hit areas, there have been businesses that have adapted their business models quickly, in order to take advantage of new opportunities.

Many companies in the digital space are still doing well – and in some cases, much better than before the lockdown.

Digital presence has become more important over the years, as businesses seek effective ways to market and sell more of their product, to more people, in more locations. All of this, whilst reducing their reliance on footfall in physical bricks and mortar locations.

The pandemic, and accompanying lockdowns, have accelerated this move.

We wanted to see what effect all of this was having on web traffic. Having access to stats for 50 websites, we thought it would be interesting to see whether the lockdown had resulted in more, or less, traffic to these websites, whether there were any clear winners and losers, and why.

So, we set about comparing the traffic for all of these sites during the main 3 months of the lockdown (April to June 2020) compared to the same 3 month period in 2019.

Ups and downs overall

As you can see from the infographic, overall website traffic for the 50 sites we cover went up.

58% of sites had higher traffic than they had in the same period in 2019.

The average change in traffic across all sites was a 15% gain, and the total change in traffic for all 50 sites was +18%.

This represents all traffic (direct, organic search, paid search, referrals), and worldwide. Only sites that already had established traffic in 2019 were included.

Winners and losers?

Of the 10 best performing sites :

B2C and B2B are split 50/50;

40% are health / wellness websites;

20% are ecommerce sites;

50% are sites that are adding regular new content;

None lost organic search traffic;

50% are businesses that would have most definitely been impacted by lockdown and social distancing measures;

Of the 10 worst performing sites :

B2C and B2B are split 50/50;

None gained organic search traffic;

20% gained social referral traffic;

The rest of this article is available on our website here.