The top 25 global websites from the 2015 Web Globalization Report Card

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UPDATE: The 2017 Web Globalization Report Card is now available.

I’m pleased to announce the publication of The 2015 Web Globalization Report Card.

Here are the top-scoring websites from the report:

Top 25 global websites of 2015

For regular readers of this blog, you’ll notice that Google is once again ranked number one.

The fact is, no other company on this list invests in web and software globalization like Google. While many software companies are happy to support 40 or even 50 languages on their websites, Google is looking at 60 or more languages across its many products. Consider Gmail, with support for more than 70 languages. And let’s not overlook Google Translate, now at 80 language pairs.

Having said all this, Google still needs to improve upon its global navigation. I was told a few years ago that such harmonization was coming and, to some extent it has, but it has largely been buried to the depth of the UI. And this is not a positive development. But even with this downside, Google remains the leader.

Hotels.com and Booking.com continue to battle it out for travel services supremacy.

It’s also worth highlighting companies like Cisco, Philips, IKEA, and Microsoft — all of which are regulars in the top 25 list.

Emirates is the first airline to break into this list. The website added support for two more languages over the past year and has left most American-based airlines far behind.

Amazon breaks into the top 25 thanks in part to adding one new market and improved support for mobile. Also new to the list is Khan Academy, which supports an impressive 30 languages so far.

As a group, the top 25 websites support an average of 50 languages; if we removed Wikipedia (which supports an exceptionally large number of languages), the average would still be an impressive 45 languages.

From 2005 to 2015
This year, we’re seeing a slowing of growth in languages, but just slightly.

We did hit the 30-language mark for the first time.

language_growth_600

As you can see here, the past decade has seen an impressive rise in languages.

This data is based on studying the leading global brands and world’s largest companies.

If you were to take a step back and look at a much-larger swatch of companies, this average drops precipitously. Which means that most companies are still just embarking on their web globalization journeys. But also means that most companies have a long ways to go before they reach this upper echelon of language support.

I’ll have much more to share in the weeks and months ahead. If you have any questions about the report, please let me know.

Congratulations to the top 25 companies and the people within these companies that have long championed web globalization.

The 2015 Web Globalization Report Card

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John Yunker

John Yunker

John is co-founder of Byte Level Research and author of Think Outside the Country as well as 19 editions of The Web Globalization Report Card.
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