A recent study of 5 trillion US website visits found that 61% of visits came from mobile phones in 2020, which is up from 57% in 2019. However, the largest number of page views per visitor was on desktops, at 3.68 pages per session on average. 

These numbers show that mobile continues to gain favor as consumers’ preferred method to access websites initially. While the number of page views was higher on desktops, tablets were second at 3.11 pages/session and mobile was next at 2.54 pages/session.

Additional study findings included:

• More time is spent on websites using desktops rather than mobile – 0.16 billion aggregated hours on desktop vs. 0.13 billion hours on mobile.
• Website visitors spend 40% more time on sites using desktop than mobile.
• The average amount of time spent on websites has decreased on all media over the past three years.
• News sites are visited more often via mobile, as are food and drink, shopping and travel and transportation sites. Site visits to business and industry, computers and electronics and jobs and education sites were more frequently from desktops.
• Average search traffic volume grew 22% YOY, with two-thirds of search traffic coming from mobile.
• The average bounce rate is now about the same on both desktop and mobile but had been higher on mobile in the previous two years.
• URL ranking positions from Google change 89% of the time on desktop. Almost one-third of URLs seen on desktop disappear during mobile searches.
• SERP features were different between desktop and mobile. Images and video were present more often on mobile but featured snippets were found twice as much on desktop and Google Ads were found 2.5 more often on desktop.