Strong increase in site visits during February

Valentine's Day helped drive a "strong increase" in UK web traffic during February, new data reveals.

Research firm comScore reported a surge in traffic last month to sites in its Flowers/Gifts/Greetings category.

Traffic to such sites grew 28 per cent from January to nearly seven million visitors in February.

The firm noted that online visitation figures traditionally dip slightly in February owing to the shortness of the month, but its 'auto manufacturer', 'career resources' and 'e-cards' categories experienced gains.

Uptake of the new Firefox browser drove visitors to the Mozilla site, which experienced a 48 per cent increase to 3.1 million visitors.

Fish4Sites grew 24 per cent to 3.3 million visitors, driven largely by a jump in visitors to its Fish4jobs careers resource site.