Alexa is Bullshit, and we need to stop using it as a traffic comparison tool.

I thought this was common knowledge, but even now I have seen speakers boasting about their site’s Alexa rank.

What’s worst is when consultants start telling business owners that their website needs to be in the top 100k alexa rank for it to be legitimate.

I was at an event when another speaker approached me to give compliments about WPBeginner’s Alexa rank which is 1317 at the time of writing this article. After the compliment, he started bragging about his own site which is in the top 50k.

Well before you make yourself look like a fool, let me tell you why Alexa is mostly bogus, and you should probably stop using it as a traffic comparison tool.

Alexa attempts to rank top websites in the world which if you look at their top 10, I probably wouldn’t even debate about. Sure Google, Facebook, YouTube, etc are the most visited sites on the planet.

However as you start going down the list, it doesn’t add up. Let me explain.

I run several websites that are in the top 50,000 alexa. However for the sake of this article, we will only analyze the following:

WPBeginner.com (Alexa rank 1317)

List25.com (Alexa rank 13,333)

OptinMonster.com (Alexa rank 13,175)

As you can see, all three of those are in the top 15,000 websites in the world according to Alexa. However the order they’re ranked in is completely wrong.

It wouldn’t take a genius to figure out that the most popular website among the three is List25. I mean come on, just look at the YouTube channel as an indicator (roughly 1.3 million subscribers and 203 million video views).

The site itself gets a crap load of visitors compared to WPBeginner and OptinMonster. Because I have Google Analytics, I can see more accurate data for each site.

Alexa is showing that OptinMonster is more popular than List25. Seriously?

List25 gets 6000% more traffic than OptinMonster site.

List25 gets a significant amount more traffic than WPBeginner as well because of it’s mass appeal compared to WPBeginner which has a smaller target audience.

Even though Alexa states the numbers are estimated, you can clearly see that the estimates are way off the mark.

I will end this rant with a small request, please stop using Alexa as a traffic comparison tool and save your dignity.