UK’s most visited websites

Given it’s Cyber Monday, the biggest online shopping day of the year, we thought we’d share some research from Experian Hitwise. Apple.com has advanced six places in the latest quarterly Hot Shops List and has now moved into the runner-up position. The list presents online retail websites that have registered the most intense traffic over the past three months.

The third quarter figures show that Amazon.co.uk remains the most visited online shopping platform, while the previous second best, Agros.co.uk has slipped to number three. This is the first time in the list’s five-year history that Argos takes such a low position. Tesco keeps its fourth position, while Next drops two places and now stands at number five.

Apple’s significant leap of six places is driven by a five-fold growth in traffic since July. In October, Apple’s UK site was visited 14m times, which equates to one in every 250 visits online. Experian Hitwise points out that the interest in Apple is likely to be fuelled by the death of its founder Steve Jobs. However, the launch of iPhone 4S also attributes to the boom in traffic.

The fastest moving websites in the third quarter were ASDA Direct, which advanced 23 places, Very.co.uk, which was up 19 positions, Ticketmaster, moving 16 places forward and H&M and Toys R Us, which both managed to leapfrog 15 other brands.