Jesse Stay at staynalive.com reported that the Church Web site LDS.org ranks at the top of all organizational Church Web sites on the Internet. It has a current Alexa rank of 3,095, and peaked at near 2,500 at the beginning of October.

I know that Alexa ranking is not a precise indicator of Web traffic, but it is one of the more prominent means we have today to compare Web sites.

I did some sluething myself and looked up the Alexa ranking for the Web sites of all the major religions that I could find. Here are all I could find that ranked under 100,000:

I think I got all the major organizational Church Web sites. Lutherans, Methodists, Baptists, and Presbyterians didn’t rank lower than 100,000.  I was surprized that the Southern Baptist Convention only ranked 204,346. Some major world religions (like Hinduism, Buddhism, and Judaism) aren’t centrally organized, and therefore have no large Internet presence. The site for the Nation of Islam, for example, ranks 576,153. I even looked at general relgious sites not tied to a specific religious organization. The largest one I know of is BeliefNet, which ranks 3,748 - still behind LDS.org.

Why does LDS.org rank so positiviely? Could it be mere curiosity about the Church, activity of members themselves, or does the Church itself have a more technical background than others? The Church has pioneered many technologies around Family History and recently has encouraged its members to blog and use the internet for good. The Church has also created a Youtube channel. The Church’s other main Web sites, FamilySearch.org (a site for genealogy enthusiasts) at 11,342, and Mormon.org at 63,314, also rank fairly high when compared to other religious Web sites.

Besides Alexa rankings, there are, obvsiouly, other traffic measures of the success of a Web site, such as referrals by search engines and growth in traffic compared with the Internet at large.


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