Historical decline in WWW subdomain use?

Analysis
1

It’s commonly said that the classic ‘www.’ subdomain is in steep decline, prompted by general lack of need and catering to mobile users. I agree that it does seem like you see more ‘foo.com’ rather than ‘www.foo.com’ each year. Can the HTTP Archive quantify this, perhaps by looking at the top 1 million domains by year and seeing what fraction either lacks a ‘www.’ subdomain or it redirects?

2

Hi @gwern.

At the end of 2018, the HTTP Archive changed the source of the URLs from Alexa to CrUX. Alexa URLs (before Dec 2018) include the www by default (www.example.com), while the CrUX URLs do not (example.com and www.example.com are both valid origins). Since the initial URL has changed, we don’t have a reliable comparison before 2018. Some websites would redirect from www.example.com to example.com, while others would serve the same content on both domains or redirect to another subdomain altogether (en.example.com or m.example.com).

Looking at the data from Dec 2018 onwards:

client year total www pct
desktop 2022* 1,246,032 511,012 41.01%
desktop 2021 5,824,858 2,508,805 43.07%
desktop 2020 6,018,707 2,716,807 45.14%
desktop 2019 4,291,086 2,086,970 48.64%
desktop 2018 3,840,067 1,815,773 47.28%
mobile 2022* 1,613,142 651,794 40.41%
mobile 2021 7,957,652 3,350,268 42.10%
mobile 2020 7,157,942 3,203,779 44.76%
mobile 2019 5,181,871 2,490,108 48.05%
mobile 2018 1,247,333 286,662 22.98%

* 2022 is sampled at 10% of corpus

Hope that helps.

Query:

#standardSQL
# Count of domains which use 'www' subdomain

WITH data_2022 AS (
  SELECT
    _TABLE_SUFFIX AS client,
    "2022" AS year,
    COUNT(DISTINCT url) AS total,
    COUNT(DISTINCT IF(REGEXP_CONTAINS(url, r"^https?://www\."), url, NULL)) AS www
  FROM
    `httparchive.pages.2022_12_01_*` TABLESAMPLE SYSTEM(10 PERCENT)
  GROUP BY
    client
),

data_2021 AS (
  SELECT
    _TABLE_SUFFIX AS client,
    "2021" AS year,
    COUNT(DISTINCT url) AS total,
    COUNT(DISTINCT IF(REGEXP_CONTAINS(url, r"^https?://www\."), url, NULL)) AS www
  FROM
    `httparchive.pages.2021_12_01_*` TABLESAMPLE SYSTEM(100 PERCENT)
  GROUP BY
    client
),

data_2020 AS (
  SELECT
    _TABLE_SUFFIX AS client,
    "2020" AS year,
    COUNT(DISTINCT url) AS total,
    COUNT(DISTINCT IF(REGEXP_CONTAINS(url, r"^https?://www\."), url, NULL)) AS www
  FROM
    `httparchive.pages.2020_12_01_*` TABLESAMPLE SYSTEM(100 PERCENT)
  GROUP BY
    client
),

data_2019 AS (
  SELECT
    _TABLE_SUFFIX AS client,
    "2019" AS year,
    COUNT(DISTINCT url) AS total,
    COUNT(DISTINCT IF(REGEXP_CONTAINS(url, r"^https?://www\."), url, NULL)) AS www
  FROM
    `httparchive.pages.2019_12_01_*` TABLESAMPLE SYSTEM(100 PERCENT)
  GROUP BY
    client
),

data_2018 AS (
  SELECT
    _TABLE_SUFFIX AS client,
    "2018" AS year,
    COUNT(DISTINCT url) AS total,
    COUNT(DISTINCT IF(REGEXP_CONTAINS(url, r"^https?://www\."), url, NULL)) AS www
  FROM
    `httparchive.pages.2018_12_15_*` TABLESAMPLE SYSTEM(100 PERCENT)
  GROUP BY
    client
),

combined_data AS (
  SELECT
  client,
  year,
  www,
  total,
  ROUND(100 * www / total, 2) AS pct
  FROM
    data_2022
  UNION ALL
  SELECT
    client,
    year,
    www,
    total,
    ROUND(100 * www / total, 2) AS pct
  FROM
    data_2021
  UNION ALL
  SELECT
    client,
    year,
    www,
    total,
    ROUND(100 * www / total, 2) AS pct
  FROM
    data_2020
  UNION ALL
  SELECT
    client,
    year,
    www,
    total,
    ROUND(100 * www / total, 2) AS pct
  FROM
    data_2019
  UNION ALL
  SELECT
    client,
    year,
    www,
    total,
    ROUND(100 * www / total, 2) AS pct
  FROM
    data_2018
)

SELECT
  client,
  year,
  total,
  www,
  pct
FROM
  combined_data
ORDER BY
  client,
  year DESC
1 Like
3

Oh, I didn’t know that about the data transition. Thanks for highlighting that - that could have been very misleading (although probably one would notice that www went off a cliff in December 2018 for no apparent reason).

Your 2018->2022 numbers seem clear, however: www is going out of fashion, at a remarkable rate of 2% a year - at least for ‘desktop’ (47% → 41%).

Do you know what’s going on with your ‘mobile’ numbers there? Did Alexa cover mobile badly while CrUX had much better coverage? Obviously ‘mobile’ browsers didn’t really jump from 23% to 48% and then immediately reverse to start declining 48%->41%. I read this as the 23% being bogus, and the real number presumably more like 49-50%, and then declining ~2%/year like ‘desktop’.

4

The 2018 data is from the mid-December run, so it should already be from CrUX. Looking at a random sample of URLs they seems correct, however in January 2019 (~ 15 days later) the data is already drastically different, so I suspect the December mobile data for Dec 2018 (both runs) is somehow incorrect.

client year www total pct
mobile Jan 2019 1905679 4023592 47.36
desktop Jan 2019 1813069 3831026 47.33

Query:

WITH data_jan_2019 AS (
  SELECT
    _TABLE_SUFFIX AS client,
    'Jan 2019' AS year,
    COUNT(DISTINCT url) AS total,
    COUNT(DISTINCT IF(REGEXP_CONTAINS(url, r"^https?://www\."), url, NULL)) AS www
  FROM
    `httparchive.pages.2019_01_01_*` TABLESAMPLE SYSTEM(100 PERCENT)
  GROUP BY
    client
)

SELECT
  client,
  year,
  www,
  total,
  ROUND(100 * www / total, 2) AS pct
FROM
  data_jan_2019
5

Note that the desktop dataset increased in size on Dec 15, 2018 while the mobile dataset lagged behind until Jan 1, 2019.

image
image2200×1202 153 KB

1 Like