The Internet has become an integral part of a lot of people’s lives in the UK. Certain cities are particularly digitally integrated however, and surprisingly, London is not the online hub of the UK.

In our analysis of Internet usage in the UK, Canterbury comes out on top as the top digital city and the true Internet hotspot in the country. Other surprise entries into the top 10 include Rochester, and Aberdeen.

Over the 12 week period between July 2010 and 18 September 2010 we looked at the 1.4 million websites visited by the online population and then filtered the visits by postcode area. Ranking by actual visits to websites would create an unfair skew for cities with large populations like London or Birmingham, so we then created an Index score which ranked the percentage of visits to websites per head of population in a given area.
Canterbury emerged as the clear winner, with an index score of 188.94, way ahead of the closest competition which was London with a score of 124.72. The analysis highlights that 1.44% of all UK Internet visits came from the Canterbury postal area, despite the area only containing 0.75% of the UK population. Put simply, of all the people online in the UK, users in Canterbury are visiting the most websites.
The most popular uses of the Internet in Canterbury are entertainment, social networking, search and shopping. In particular, Canterbury Internet users are some of the biggest consumers of online video and online gaming.

A quick look at the top websites visited by Canterbury Internet users reveals the usual crop of popular websites including Google, Facebook and YouTube. What’s interesting is when we look at the websites that have the greatest percentage of traffic from Canterbury a lot of gaming sites come to the fore.

Canterbury clearly has a lot of Xbox 360 owners who use their consoles a lot, and the fact that Gamestation is also in the top 20 websites indicates Canterbury gamers are buying new video games from this site. The city also appears to have a big following for Blizzard’s World of Warcraft, with lots of visitors to forums and help sites like MMO Champion and World of Warcraft Wiki.