Visualizing 2024 Web Traffic Trends Through ATI's Lens
In today’s evolving digital world, understanding web traffic trends has become more essential than ever for network operators, equipment vendors, and technology strategists. For 2024, the ATI team utilized its advanced automated web-crawling technology to collect and analyse traffic data from the top 50 websites on a monthly basis. This focused approach allowed us to uncover the intricate patterns and shifts in user behaviour, network demands, and application protocol dynamics throughout the year. Our analysis offers a comprehensive overview of how web traffic evolved by highlighting key trends and their implications for the broader digital infrastructure.
Data Acquisition Methods
In our comprehensive analysis, we focused on web traffic data corresponding to the top 50 websites, as ranked by SimilarWeb in January 2024.
The crawling process utilized in-house techniques, augmented by the state-of-the-art Keysight UI/UX automation software, Eggplant. This combination ensured a thorough and efficient data collection process.
Each website was crawled using a structured approach, capturing HTTP request-response data, TLS handshakes, and cipher suite negotiations. We employed a Depth-First Search (DFS) traversal method to explore each site to a predefined depth, maximizing coverage of diverse content types and network interactions. This rigorous and consistent data collection process allowed us to build a comprehensive dataset, offering valuable insights into web traffic trends throughout the year.
Key Findings
The study analysed 212,526 TLS handshakes and a total of 806,508 HTTP request-response packets. This report focuses primarily on HTTP/1, HTTP/2, and HTTP/3 traffic, as these protocols constitute a substantial share of overall internet traffic.
Traffic Insight
The analysis of the traffic shows that the significant portion of the traffic, 63.37% is HTTP/2. HTTP/3 adoption has seen a significant rise from the last year making it 28.58% of the observed traffic. Despite this growth HTTP/2 continues to dominate, though its share declined compared to last year with the HTTP/3 gaining its traction. Meanwhile, HTTP/1.1 constitutes the remainder of the traffic, maintaining its presence as a legacy protocol. The increased adoption of HTTP/3, leveraging QUIC for enhanced speed and reduced latency, reflects a clear trend toward optimizing user experience and network resource utilization in high-demand scenarios.
Fig 1: Distribution of HTTP Versions
The analysis of the content-type reveals that the image files were the most frequently observed content type, encompassing various formats such as PNG, JPEG, WebP, GIF, AVIF, and SVG. This highlights the continued importance of visually rich and modern web layouts in delivering engaging user experiences, the high percentage of text/javascript MIME type is basically for maintaining the compatibility with the older clients. The second most prevalent content type was JavaScript files, underlining their critical role in enabling interactive and dynamic web applications. JSON files, commonly used for backend data exchange and API interactions, ranked third in prevalence. Following closely were HTML files (text/html), reflecting the structural foundation of web pages.
Fig 2: Distribution of Content-Type by File Count
Server Analysis
The varied distribution of server types observed in web traffic analysis is a testament to the complexity and specialization of modern web infrastructure. Servers like Nginx, Amazon S3, and Cloudflare play specific roles in scaling, securing, and optimizing web traffic. Meanwhile, the intenti onal masking of server information through proxies or configurations settings adds a layer of security and it’s the main reason for the significant amount of unknown server type, this practice has increased significantly from the last year thus preventing server fingerprinting.
The rise in server obfuscation techniques reflects a broader trend in cybersecurity, where proactive measures are increasingly being employed to protect server infrastructure from potential threats, ensuring the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of web services.
Fig 3: Distribution of Server Stack Technologies
The distribution of traffic by server location reveals that most of the traffic originated from servers located in the United States (US). Additionally, a significant portion of the traffic came from servers in Russia (RU), while Japanese (JP), Chinese (CN) and the servers from the Netherland (NL) also played notable roles in serving the observed web traffic.
Fig 4: Distribution of Traffic by server location
Please note that, the precise server locations were determined using a Geoip database, to determine server location from observed IP addresses.
Encryption Analysis
TLS 1.3 contributed 73.66%, si gnalling its widespread adoption as the preferred encryption protocol for secure data transmission. This version includes both HTTPS and QUIC, provides enhanced security and performance, establishing it as the standard choice for modern web communications. TLS 1.2 which contributes 26.34% of the traffic, despite its decline from last year contribution it continues to be in use across a substantial portion of the web.
Fig 5: Distribution of TLS version
The cipher suite distribution shows TLS_AES_128_GCM_SHA256 as the most prevalent, comprising 51.01% of usage, followed by TLS_ECDHE_RSA_WITH_AES_128_GCM_SHA256 at nearly 30%, reflecting strong adoption for secure communications. TLS_ECDHE_RSA_WITH_AES_256_GCM_SHA384 accounts for almost 18.5%, indicating an increased preference for enhanced encryption strength. Older suites like TLS_RSA_WITH_AES_128_CBC_SHA are still in use but in minimal amounts. This distribution highlights a shift towards stronger encryption while maintaining a balance between security and performance across various applications.
Fig 6: Distribution of Cipher-Suites
Conclusion
The year-long analysis of top websites in 2024 highlights key shifts in web traffic, encryption, and content delivery trends. The increasing adoption of modern protocols like HTTP/3 and TLS 1.3, alongside the evolving distribution of server locations and content types, underscores the web’s continuous push for efficiency, security, and performance. These insights emphasize the need for adaptable network infrastructure that accommodates emerging technologies while maintaining compatibility with legacy systems. As the digital ecosystem evolves, these trends will play a crucial role in shaping future networking strategies, ensuring a more resilient, scalable, and optimized internet experience.
Testing Network Resilience with BreakingPoint
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