Website engagement is shaped by attention, access, audience habits and site experience. UK adults spent 4 hours 30 minutes online per day in May 2025, while global benchmark data shows that slow pages, friction and shallow sessions can weaken the value of that attention. The figures below separate reach and time from visits, page views, conversion and survey preferences.
Contents
- How much time people spend online
- Devices and apps that shape engagement
- Platform reach, search and attention
- News website reach and audience differences
- How audiences choose digital news
- Global traffic, friction and conversion benchmarks
- France website engagement by device
How much time people spend online
Ofcom’s Online nations report 2025 measured UK online behavior primarily in May 2025. UK adults averaged 4 hours 30 minutes online per day, an increase of 10 minutes from 2024. These figures describe online activity; app and organization time excludes television viewing unless stated otherwise.
Age differences were substantial. Adults aged 18–24 spent 6 hours 20 minutes online per day, compared with 3 hours 20 minutes among adults aged 65 and over. Gender differences also appeared in the measure: women averaged 4 hours 43 minutes per day, and women spent 26 minutes more online than men on average. Among adults aged 65 and over, women spent 17% more time online than men of the same age.
For website owners, these figures describe the size of the available attention pool rather than the time any one site receives. They also show why audience segmentation matters: a content strategy aimed at younger adults is working within a longer daily online window than one aimed at older adults.
Devices and apps that shape engagement
Smartphones accounted for 75% of men’s daily online time and 79% of women’s in May 2025, according to Ofcom. Men spent 15% of their online time on computers, equal to 38 minutes per day, while women spent 8% on computers. Tablets represented 14% of women’s online time and 10% of men’s.
App breadth was also high. UK adult smartphone users visited an average of 41 apps in May 2025, up by 3 apps from 2024. Users aged 65 and over visited 31 apps on average. Women visited 42 smartphone apps, compared with 40 for men. Google Maps reached 77% of UK adult smartphone users.
| UK engagement measure | Result | Measurement period |
|---|---|---|
| Daily online time, all adults | 4 hours 30 minutes | May 2025 |
| Daily online time, ages 18–24 | 6 hours 20 minutes | May 2025 |
| Daily online time, ages 65+ | 3 hours 20 minutes | May 2025 |
| Average apps visited | 41 | May 2025 |
| Average apps visited, ages 65+ | 31 | May 2025 |
| Google Maps reach | 77% | May 2025 |
The device split is relevant to engagement design. A site may receive most of its traffic through a phone while still needing desktop layouts for longer sessions or research-heavy tasks. The supplied Ofcom measurements establish the device mix, but they do not state that mobile users necessarily engage less with every type of website.
Platform reach, search and attention
YouTube reached 94% of UK online adults in May 2025, and average daily time on the service was 51 minutes, up from 47 minutes in 2024. Google Search was used by 82% of UK online adults. Facebook and Messenger reached 93% and averaged 42 minutes per day, while WhatsApp reached 90% and averaged 17 minutes per day.
Meta and Alphabet services together accounted for 51% of UK adults’ daily online time, or 2 hours 18 minutes, in May 2025. The concentration is important for acquisition planning: broad online reach does not mean that attention is evenly distributed across websites and platforms.
Search activity remained large. Google Search handled about 3 billion monthly UK web searches in 2025. ChatGPT recorded 252 million UK web visits in August 2025, which was 156% more than in August 2024. The ChatGPT figure is a year-over-year web-visit comparison, while the Google figure is a monthly search estimate; they should not be treated as equivalent measures of engagement.
News website reach and audience differences
Ofcom’s May 2025 UK data shows that news-service engagement varied by age. Among online adults aged 18–34, daily reach was 56% and average daily time was 10 minutes. Among online adults aged 55 and over, daily reach was 79% and average daily time was 16 minutes.
The BBC reached 77% of UK online adults, or 37.6 million people. Its average daily audience was 33%, or 16.3 million people. The Sun reached 45%, or 22.0 million people, while The Guardian reached 44%, or 21.8 million people.
Apple News together with Apple Weather reached 40% of UK online adults, or 19.0 million people. Apple News alone reached 28%, or 13.6 million people, up from 25% in 2024. These are reach and audience measures for UK online adults, not claims about the number of page views generated by each organization.
The age contrast is useful when interpreting a website’s analytics. A lower daily reach among younger adults does not necessarily mean that news is absent from their media routine; it may reflect different services, access routes or definitions of daily reach. The reported figures support the narrower conclusion that older UK online adults used news services more often and for longer on average in May 2025.
How audiences choose digital news
Pew Research Center’s How Americans get their local news, and who provides it reported that 26% of U.S. adults preferred news websites for getting local news in 2024. The same report found that the share who at least sometimes got local news from online forums rose from 38% in 2018 to 52% in 2024. The share using online-only sources at least sometimes rose from 15% to 33% over the same period.
Access routes differed by legacy format. Among U.S. adults who got local TV news, 37% primarily accessed it online in 2024. Among those who got local daily-newspaper news, 66% primarily accessed it online: 41% through websites or apps and 25% through social media.
Pew’s Digital news platform preferences chart used a U.S. adult survey conducted from July 15 to August 4, 2024. In that survey, 23% preferred news websites for getting news, 18% preferred social media, 12% preferred search and 5% preferred podcasts. Social-media preference increased from 12% in 2023 to 18% in 2024, while news-website preference declined from 25% to 23%.
These Pew results are survey findings for U.S. adults, so they describe stated preferences rather than measured sessions or page views. They also concern news and local news, not all website categories.
Global traffic, friction and conversion benchmarks
Contentsquare’s Benchmark Report: Rising Acquisition Costs and More compared aggregated digital-experience activity. Its 2025 benchmark found that the cost of an online visit rose 9% year over year and 19% over two years. Website conversion rates fell 6.1% year over year in the comparison of Q4 2023 with Q4 2024.
Contentsquare’s 2024 data found that 40% of online visits experienced user frustration. Slow-loading content caused 53% of users to exit after viewing only one page. Paid channels accounted for 39% of analyzed digital traffic in 2024, up from 37% in 2023, and paid social produced a 12% increase in traffic.
The benchmark also identified quality trade-offs. Websites with greater reliance on paid social recorded 9.2% higher bounce rates, 8.7% fewer page views and 10.6% lower conversions. This does not mean paid social causes those outcomes for every site; it describes the relationship reported in the aggregated benchmark.
Several results point to the value of improving the experience after acquisition. Digitally disciplined organizations reduced load-time frustration by 22% in 2024. Websites that increased session depth by at least 10% saw an average 5.4% increase in conversions. Organizations focused on digital frustration reduced friction 4.5 times more effectively than their peers.
Contentsquare’s figures are aggregated benchmarks, not universal estimates for every website. They compare specified periods and should be used as directional reference points alongside a site’s own analytics.
France website engagement by device
Contentsquare’s La Lettre de l’Expérience Digitale – Mars 2025 analyzed 11.7 billion website sessions and 58.5 billion page views in France during 2024. The benchmark covered 1,906 websites across 9 sectors.
Mobile devices generated 74.8% of French website traffic, compared with 25.2% from desktop. New visitors represented 43.7% of traffic and returning visitors 56.3%. Despite mobile’s larger traffic share, desktop sessions averaged 6.1 page views, compared with 4.6 on mobile.
Time per session also differed by device. Average session time was 5 minutes 37 seconds on desktop versus 2 minutes 17 seconds on mobile. The figures indicate that mobile is the main entry point in this France benchmark, while desktop sessions were deeper and longer on average.
The France results cover 2024 activity and a defined set of websites and sectors. They are therefore a benchmark for that population, not a forecast of future traffic or a universal rule about mobile and desktop engagement.