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Belfast Live
Belfast Live
National
Brendan Hughes

NI political party websites with the most and least views from Stormont officials

For Northern Ireland's political parties, their websites offer a chance to promote their policies, make their pitch to voters and even perhaps entice new members.

But for Stormont civil servants keeping the cogs of government turning, it seems these flashy sites are of scant interest.

And some parties have had surprisingly little traffic to their websites despite their electoral successes.

Read more: MLA sets up new consultancy business during Stormont's collapse

Stormont's IT systems recorded just 6,746 page views across 10 of the websites for Northern Ireland political parties over a period of six months.

Sinn Féin, which last year became the largest party in the Assembly, had the most views of its website with 1,928.

The DUP ranked sixth on the list with just over 100 views, despite being Stormont's second-largest party and the largest unionist party.

The figures, disclosed in a Freedom of Information response, cover the six months until mid-December last year.

They were provided by the Department of Finance's Enterprise Shared Services on behalf of the Northern Ireland government departments.

The page views for each political party website over the six-month period were:

1. Sinn Féin: 1,928

2. Alliance: 1,598

3. SDLP: 1,341

4. UUP: 1,292

5. Green Party: 399

6. DUP: 108

7. Northern Ireland Conservatives: 52

8. TUV: 28

9. Aontú: 0

10. PUP: 0

There were 22,536 full-time-equivalent staff in the Northern Ireland Civil Service as of April last year.

In its FOI response, the Department of Finance said it "monitors and controls individual user access to internet sites but does not hold more than six months of information".

It added: "We can only provide details for total page views over the period. The page view count is incremented on each click into the home page or the subpages of a site."

Since last year the DUP has been blocking Stormont's Executive and Assembly in protest against post-Brexit trade barriers with Great Britain under the Northern Ireland Protocol.

The Windsor Framework was agreed between the UK and European Union earlier this year in a bid to address issues with the arrangements, but the DUP has continued to raise concerns.

Earlier this year it emerged Northern Ireland parties spent tens of thousands of pounds on targeted social media ads in the run-up to May's local government elections.

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