I’ve announced the top 25 global websites from the 2023 Web Globalization Report Card.
But that only tells part of the story.
To better understand how companies compete against their peers, I grouped the websites into 13 categories — from automotive to financial services to travel & hospitality. Below is the list of categories, as well as which company website emerged on top.
| Industry | Leader |
|---|---|
| Automotive | Volvo |
| Consumer Goods | Nestlé |
| Consumer Technology | Adobe |
| Content & Social | |
| Diversified | Philips |
| Enterprise Technology. | DHL |
| Financial Services | Visa |
| Luxury | Cartier |
| Medical/Pharma | Pfizer |
| Nonprofit/Community | Wikipedia. |
| Professional Services | Deloitte |
| Retail & Ecommerce | IKEA |
| Travel & Hospitality | Airbnb |
The point here is that not all industries do an equally good job of globalization; some lag quite a bit, such as Luxury (Cartier did not even make it into the top 25 best global websites).
Which means that if your company is a member of one of these industries, you would be well served to look beyond your direct competitors and focus also on the leaders of categories such as web services, travel, and consumer technology. Which is one of the main reasons for why I created this report back in 2003.
One example can be seen with airline websites, namely in their global gateway menus.
Many airlines continues to rely on what I call a multi-part pull-down menu, which ranges from cumbersome to nearly impossible to navigate for most non-English speaking visitors. So why do so many airline websites use their difficult interfaces? Because their competitors do so. They see what they believe to be best practices mirrored in their nearest competitors and assume they are doing the right thing. But if they were to look at websites from, say, Airbnb or Adobe, they might consider more user-friendly global gateway menus.
Fortunately, companies are doing a much better job these days of looking beyond their competitors when embarking on their next redesign. But, when it comes to luxury brands, airline websites and most automotive websites, there is still much room for improvement.
