This blog post is a supporting post in a series examining the effectiveness of British political party websites – for a summary of the short study, and my conclusions, click here.

Generally, my preferred measure of global website popularity comes from compete.com, who in this case only record traffic for the BNP and the Conservatives.

Compete.com graph

According to compete.com, the Conservative Party saw 4,698 unique visitors in June 2009 to the BNP’s 3,343. Unfortunately, in this  case Compete is not the best site to use – Compete’s figures massively under-report the actual traffic, probably because the majority of their data is gathered in the US.

Alexa

Without access to the likes of Hitwise, this forces me into the rather unpredictable world of Alexa. I don’t normally assign a great deal of weight to Alexa figures, and will avoid rehashing the arguments for and against their data here. However, I wasn’t prepared to use Alexa ranking as part of the scores, so they don’t have any bearing on the end result.

Alexa graph

You can see in the chart above that in global terms, when excluding the BNP, each of the political sites is much of a muchness when it comes to traffic.

Where a lower figure is ‘better’, the global rank Alexa assigns to each of the major sites is:

  1. Conservative: 116,400
  2. UKIP: 173,731
  3. Lib Dem: 181,085
  4. Labour: 189,384
  5. Green: 234,390

The BNP have a much higher rank, 27,526 – a fact that is boasted on the front page of bnp.org.uk. I would suggest this figure is suspiciously high and has most likely been manipulated by BNP supporters installing the Alexa data gathering toolbar. However, I don’t doubt that proportionally the BNP website is one of the most popular political party websites in Britain – possibly the most popular.

As with political blogs, political parties of the right perform rather better than their left-wing counterparts.

Clearly underlining the message that content is king (and you need strong content to build up a dedicated community) is the fact that ‘party celebrity’ blogs significantly outperform their own party sites in the rankings. For example the Conservative blogger Iain Dale has an Alexa rank of 69,419 – nearly 47,000 places above his own party’s website.