Jesse Stay at staynalive.com reported that the Church website LDS.org ranks at the top of all organizational Church websites on the Internet. It has a current Alexa rank of 3,095, and peaked at near 2,500 at the beginning of October.
I know that Alexa ranking is not a precise indicator of web traffic, but it is one of the more prominent means we have today to compare websites.
I did some sluething myself and looked up the Alexa ranking for the websites of all the major religions that I could find. Here are all I could find that ranked under 100,000:
- 13,260 The Holy See (The Vatican)
- 19,072 Watchtower.org (Jehovas Witnesses)
- 25,990 Catholic.org
- 62,988 Anglican/Episcopal
- 70,560 Venganza.org (The Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster – just for fun)
- 71,175 Assemblies of God
- 80,547 Seventh-day Adventist
- 90,394 Evangelical Lutheran Church in America
I think I got all the major organizational Church Web sites. Lutherans, Methodists, Baptists, and Presbyterians didn’t rank lower than 100,000. I was surprized that the Southern Baptist Convention only ranked 204,346. Some major world religions (like Hinduism, Buddhism, and Judaism) aren’t centrally organized, and therefore have no large Internet presence. The site for the Nation of Islam, for example, ranks 576,153. I even looked at general relgious sites not tied to a specific religious organization. The largest one I know of is BeliefNet, which ranks 3,748 – still behind LDS.org.
Why does LDS.org rank so positiviely? Could it be mere curiosity about the Church, activity of members themselves, or does the Church itself have a more technical background than others? The Church has pioneered many technologies around Family History and recently has encouraged its members to blog and use the internet for good. The Church has also created a Youtube channel. The Church’s other main websites, FamilySearch.org (a site for genealogy enthusiasts) at 11,342, and Mormon.org at 63,314, also rank fairly high when compared to other religious websites.
Besides Alexa rankings, there are, obvsiouly, other traffic measures of the success of a website, such as referrals by search engines and growth in traffic compared with the Internet at large.
Not to take away from any of the reasons you listed, but one thing I would take into account is the advertising efforts of the church. Odds are none of the other sites listed have their link in any ad campaigns.
I think the website use of members themselves has a lot to do with it. I use it almost daily– to prepare primary lessons, to watch a conference talk, to find a talk on some topic or other, to check out temple operating hours. It is designed to be useful to the members, and I think most members with internet access us it frequently. My parents who are probably a little less internet savvy than most still use LDS.org often.
I would imagine that it has to do with the centralized nature of the Church and it bureaucracy. All official periodicals, lesson materials, instruction, etc. are only found at the official Church website. Other religions are much more decentralized. I would imagine that if there were only one Southern Baptist Sunday School curriculum, youth ministry resource, and policy guide, their website would likely rank much higher.
Agree with J. Stapley’s analysis. The LDS Church is the largest exclusively top-down religious organization on earth. In other religious denominations things are not so centralized; initiatives start more often at the local or regional level. Not so in our lovely Deseret.
In 2006, a web analytic group called Hitwise (who at the time was the only business to have metrics on religious websites) showed lds.org ranked 2nd in a list of top religious websites. Here was the original list:
1. Beliefnet
2. LDS.org
3. Bible Gateway
4. Crosswalk.com
5. American Family Association
Of that list, only one site has a higher Alexa ranking than the Church, and that is Bible Gateway. Bible Gateway is not associated with a specific religion, and is more of a resource to look up bible passages in various translations and versions.
Alexa is worthless.
That said, I would certainly expect LDS.org to sit near or at the top of these sorts of rankings whilst this whole Prop 8 business is ongoing.
After Nov. 4th? Not so much.
Dear Chino,
LDS.org isn’t seeing any increase in traffic due to Proposition 8 and we don’t expect any decrease after Nov 4. Visitors to our sites looking for this kind of information represent such a small fraction of the total visitors that we don’t see spikes in traffic when there are political or social issues in the news.
You’re right that Alexa has its problems. Note the comment above about Hitwise, which measured traffic and showed that LDS.org was second only to BeliefNet.
The traffic patterns on LDS.org that have produced these rankings have been in place for several years.
Another church with a decent Alexa ranking (higher than that of the Southern Baptist Convention) is The Christian and Missionary Alliance, which was founded in 1884 and currently has about half a million members in the United States. Its Web site, cmalliance.org, currently has an Alexa ranking of 267,175 as of the time I’m posting this.
http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details/cmalliance.org
I’m aware of this church only because I have an uncle who is a C&MA pastor.
It would be interesting to do the same tests with quantcast.com. That website seems to do a better job capturing traffic than alexa.
I found this very interesting. I know personally I use LDS.org to look up talks, etc. and I think a lot of other LDS members do too. This site is probably used a lot due to the many LDS members that use it.