The Most Popular Excel Websites Based on Alexa Ranking

When I started MBA Excel, I never really gave much thought to Excel’s broader web community, which I was implicitly joining.  At the time, I was really just posting Excel tips and tricks because I thought they were interesting and would be useful to fellow MBA students.  While my engagement and capacity to contribute to this website has flexed up and down over the years, my involvement and understanding of the Excel community has gradually increased.  This has mainly been through one off comments on blog posts, or just me reading up on an Excel topics through another Excel expert’s website.

I thought it would interesting to take a step back, look at the broader Excel web community, and see what the most popular Excel websites really were.  In going through this process, I knew there would be a lot of affirmation; the Excel websites I visited the most were likely going to rank very high.  But the real benefit to me was content discovery, in this case, finding a really popular Excel website that I had not heard of before.

For anyone viewing this list as an Excel learner, take this as a point of social proof.  It’s always nice to get a recommendation for an Excel website, but the ones listed below are definitely worth your time.  The websites listed are all related to Excel from a topic perspective, but have a wide range of specialties, including bloggers, trainers and course providers, plug-in developers, book authors, and Excel forum moderators.

The Process

• Inclusion criteria was probably the most difficult part of the process, as I wanted to keep this list focused on Excel.  I’ve included websites that are related to Excel but are focused on more advanced topics, such as PowerPivot and VBA, however, this list will obviously not cover those ancillary topics in detail
• In terms of getting the websites, the overall process was somewhat unscientific.   Many websites I knew off the top of my head.  Additionally, Rick Grantham and Exceljet both have very good “Who’s Who of Excel” type lists that I was able to refer to.  Beyond that, I just supplemented with various Google searches on the topic.
• For the list, I’ve only included websites with a ranking less than 1,000,000 and for the chart, I’ve only included the Top 20 to keep it clean
• There’s little doubt in my mind that I’ve missed some websites, so if there are some notable omissions, please let me know

Analysis Caveats

• Alexa rankings change over time, and therefore, by the time you’re reading this, the specific rankings shown in the chart and table are probably out of date; the rankings shown were captured on November 15th, 2015
• Alexa rankings are based on an estimate of overall traffic and popularity, and therefore these figures do have a margin of error
• The list represents “relative” differences in traffic, not absolute; the difference between two ranks could be 10 unique visitors, or 1,000 unique visitors, which you can’t determine with Alexa unless you sign up for their premium plan
• There are other websites that actually provide traffic estimates for free, but the intent of this post was just to get a sense of relative popularity
• Subdomains, pages within larger domains, and blog hosted websites are all a little tricky to account for using Alexa; for example, the excel.tips.net ranking is actually the ranking for tips.net, but it I included it because it would have felt weird to leave out Allen Wyatt
• Because this list was created by someone in the US, it definitely has a US bias, as I only have a handful of non-English websites listed
• The rank used is the Alexa global rank, not the country rank

Takeaways

• Having a popular Excel website is just one way to influence the Excel community.  Many people do it through writing books, teaching live courses, or answering questions in forums and through email.
• Many of the Excel rockstars I’ve heard of unsurprisingly rank near the top (Chandoo, MrExcel, Contextures, etc).  After Contextures, however, there does seem to be a bit of a drop off in popularity before we get to the “rest of the Excel world.”
• Traffic is a fickle subject to deal with and there’s no vanilla method to differentiate a popular website from less popular ones.  What I can say about the top sites in the Excel world is that they are clearly prolific with their content and extremely passionate about the subject matter.  (I doubt Alexa rankings are a top concern of theirs)  If you have these two qualities, then your website definitely has a chance to succeed.
• Of the top 20 websites, about half have the word “Excel” in their URLs.  I’ve personally felt that from an SEO perspective, the importance of having your keyword in your URL has gone down over time, but it’s still a very popular marketing approach.
• Most of the websites listed are by current or former Excel MVPs (I guess I’m part of the minority here, and maybe should look into that certification)
• Lastly, the fact that this site made the list, in the company of people I’ve admired for years, is a surprise and definitely an honor

As I mentioned before, if there are any major Excel websites I’ve missed, let me know.  Going through this has provided me insight to a lot of great Excel websites that I didn’t even know existed before.