Guardian News & Media's chief digital officer, Tanya Cordrey (pictured), writes: Five years ago Guardian Unlimited was relaunched as guardian.co.uk, and we were the first UK newspaper website to break 20m unique browsers per month.
Yesterday, our online traffic hit another record high, with the latest figures from ABC revealing that we are now seeing over 81m unique browsers accessing our site a month, and over 470m page views. This is the third month in a row we have seen record traffic, and testament to our digital-first strategy, which we announced nearly two years ago.
Our audience is no longer primarily in the UK. Every month, our online content is accessed from almost every country around the world. In fact, UK users now represent just a third of our total audience.
As a result, we're ready to take the next step on our bold digital journey. Later this year we'll be moving all of our global online properties to a new home – theguardian.com.
This may be a small URL change but it marks a big step for the Guardian and reflects our evolution from a much-respected national print newspaper based only in the UK – reaching hundreds of thousands of people once a day – to a leading global news and media brand, with offices around the world, and an ever-growing worldwide audience accessing Guardian journalism every minute of every day.
Research by Searchmetrics published only this week shows that we are already a leading global presence, with our website being the only non 'dot com' news site to appear in a list of the top 10 news sites showing up in Google News results.
Our move to theguardian.com will only strengthen our global presence and is a loud signal of our status as a leading digital news provider and of the breadth and depth of our content.
For our millions of online readers across all time zones all over the world, this move will streamline several domains – including guardian.co.uk, our mobile site m.guardian.co.uk, guardiannews.com (our current US homepage) and our forthcoming digital edition in Australia – into one core destination for all of our digital content.
Investing in digital is crucial to the future of journalism and publishing, and moving to www.theguardian.com will simplify the user experience for our readers. In turn, this will open up more worldwide commercial possibilities for us in markets across the globe, enabling us to offer our partners and advertisers increased access to our growing global audience.
Over the coming months ahead of the move, our in-house digital team, working closely with the team at Yoast.com, will be working on this ambitious and challenging project. The Guardian websites involve millions of URLs and around 15 years' worth of content, so it will take some time.
