Every year for as long as I can remember (14 years, to be precise), John Yunker of Byte Level Research has been producing a web globalization report card. In the report, John benchmarks the websites for 150 global brands from twelve industry categories. This year’s report card was released recently and it is worth a read.

John selects the websites to analyze using the Interbrand Best Global Brands list. In addition, more than 30% of the companies he benchmarks are in the Fortune 100. In other words, it is a very good sample of mulitnational brands.

This year, John decided to include very large religious organizations. This is the first time religious groups have been included along with various business verticals. And, some of them did rather well.

The Top 25 Global Websites

I am always interested in the 25 best global websites. Here is this year’s list, in order:

1. Wikipedia
2. Google
3. NIVEA
4. Microsoft
5. Adobe
6. Facebook
7. Booking.com
8. Philips
9. Hotels.com
10. Nestle
11. Cisco Systems
12. Intel
13. Jehovah’s Witnesses
14. IKEA
15. Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints
16. Pampers
17. Nikon
18. BMW
19. 3M
20. Coca-cola
21. Nissan
22. Starbucks
23. Hitachi
24. American Express
25. Canon

If you want to see some excellent examples of global websites, look no farther than this list of Top 25. John and I almost always agree on the rankings and this year is no exception.

The big news this year is that Wikipedia scored the highest overall, beating out Google. Google had been the #1 global website on this list for many years. As John points out, Wikipedia has the most lightweight mobile website of any of the 150 websites that were included. This appears to be the tipping point that moved Wikipedia to the top.

A few other things I noticed

The following companies were on the Top 25 list for 2017, but are no longer on the list:

• Twitter
• Nike
• TripAdvisor
• GoDaddy
• KPMG
• Deloitte

And while including a new category (religious organizations) displaced 2 companies from the Top 25, that change, alone, does not account for 6 companies moving down on the list.

These companies are new to the Top 25 when compared to 2017:

• Jehovah’s Witnesses
• Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints
• BMW
• Coca-cola
• Hitachi
• Canon

I’m glad to see that Coca-cola made it into the Top 25. I have always admired the work Coca-cola does on its global websites. I think they do a fabulous job of not only localizing the sites, but really creating new content for almost every site that speaks directly to the customers of the area.

I’m hoping John shares the bottom 25 sites with me, as well. If he does, I will be sure to share the list with you.

For more information on the report and on Byte Level Research, click here.