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NHS Website: Web Traffic, Content, Organic and Mobile Stats



Between January 2013 and July 2013, over half of the web traffic to NHS.uk came from a mobile device or tablet. And yet in spite of this, the site (which serves as a vital information portal) isn’t mobile ready.

That was just one stat that jumped out at us following our recent Freedom of Information request to the Health and Social Care Information Centre.

Our Request

Back in August, we made an FOI request asking for the following information:

From 1st January 2012 to 31st July 2012:

1           How many web visits has www.nhs.uk had?

2           How many of these visits were from users on smartphone devices?

3           How many of these visits were from users on tablet devices?

4           Which are the top 10 most visited pages in this time frame?

5           During this period, what was the average visit duration for:

  1. Users on desktop computers
  2. Users on tablet devices
  3. Users on smartphones

6           How many visits, overall, were organic search visits?

7           What were the top 100 referring organic keywords over this period, along with the number of visits these keywords referred?

8           How many visits were referred from social media websites?

We would also like the same information for the period 1st January 2013 – 31st July 2013

Key Stats

The HSCIS responded answering each of our questions. Although it does appear that the NHS.uk website uses Google Analytics, the HSCIC was unable to separate mobile and tablet traffic for us. However, we did get answers to each of the other questions we’ve asked. The key numbers included:

  • In the opening 7 months of 2013, www.nhs.uk received 195,524,673 visits (up by 86.6% against figures for the same period of 2012).
  • Almost 99 million of them were from a smartphone or tablet device
  • 122.8 million visits to www.nhs.uk in the opening 7 months of 2013 were organic
  • Just over 734,000 of the visits to the www.nhs.uk from January to July 2013 were from social media sources.

NHS Top Referring Organic Keywords (Jan 2013 – July 2013)

We asked for the top 100 referring organic keywords (the full list of which can be found on the spreadsheet below). The top 10 were:

nhs website organic keywords

Get all the data

We love a good nosey through a big website’s statistics, particularly one that serves such a vital purpose for the general public. And if you fancy a look for yourself, you can download the spreadsheet here.

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