Website Name Trends in the Top Million Websites ~ codemakit

1 Billion Websites! That is the number of indexed websites that exist on the internet, as per the estimations of dazeinfo and Dailymail.

New websites are constantly being added. What is surprising is that the top million often remains unchanged.

Alexa provides data for the top 1 million best performing websites of the world. But, is there something other than amazing content, Beautiful fonts or super intelligent color combinations that pull users towards websites or is it something entirely unrelated? What about the size of the website name.

It is a common knowledge that users often dread typing in long lines of text in the address bar. Many would argue, that with the advent of "Search from the bar" type of browsers, users need not type-in the complete url anymore. However, a longer website name might strain the memory.

What is the perfect domain name?

The Garage at godady.com shared a few tips for fishing the perfect domain name. According to them, the first and the foremost condition one must remember is that a domain name must be really easy to type. You should also keep it simple, utilise keywords and avoid numbers.

The top million out of a billion is 0.1%. So, let’s find out what does the data say about the top 0.1% of all websites in the world.

Word Length

For any URL of the format, ., the website name is most important, as it defines the website, makes it visible and gives it an identity. Lets find out what our analysis says about website name.

Firstly, It was found that the frequency of website followed a typical Gaussian curve while attaining the peak at around 7-8 letters. About 100,000 websites within the top million had a word length of 7-8 letters. It is also imperative to note that though we've reached the peak at 7-8 letters, there still exist websites that have lengths of more than 20 letters!

Vowel Length

Now, can you think of 20 letter English word? I tried and could find the word ABSTEMIOUSNESSES, (a 16 letter word). What is really, interesting is that, a website with a name longer than most can imagine still features among the top million in the world.

Total number of Vowels and Website Frequency

Another interesting observation is that the number of vowels in websites too followed a Gaussian curve. The most common number of vowels in a website name is 3. In the million websites, 10% of them had a single vowel. It is also worth mentioning that 36,000 websites do not even have a vowel.

Of course, there are websites with more than 10 vowels in them, but nothing can be said without comparing the total length of such names. So, to understand the data better, we divide the number of vowels with the total number of letters in the word.

Vowels as a percentage of Word length

Since, analysis of such huge data set is difficult, we would divide the complete vowel data into bands of 0.2 or 20% each.

One look at Vowel percentage and website frequency data would tell us that for most websites, 40 percent of the word length is a vowel and 60% is a consonant.

Moving towards the exceptions, more than 500 websites in our data-set contains 80-100 percent vowels. Also, as mentioned above, 36,000 websites do not have any vowels at all, i.e. 3.6%. Finally, around 90% of websites lie in the band of 0.2 to 0.6.

In Conclusion,

After analyzing the top million websites we find that,

Most websites have a word length of 8 words
Most websites have a vowel length of 3 words
Most websites have 20-40% of their name as vowel

Finally, You can still have an amazing website even when your website name does not have a vowel or is filled with vowels.

Jan 31, 2016