An independent news website is celebrating after hitting an online milestone.

Island Echo, which covers the Isle of Wight, has recorded three million page views in a month for the first time in its 10-year history.

The Echo achieved a total of 3.1m page views during August, a 10.6pc increase year-on-year, with a total of 393,000 readers, a 14.6pc rise, visiting the site.

The busiest day for traffic was Friday 26 August, when 162,490 page views were generated in a single day.

Editor and publisher Darren Toogood, pictured, said: “To reach this incredible milestone is absolutely fantastic, especially in our 10th year and less than 12 months after being named the ICNN Community News Website of the Year at the newsawards2021.

“Since the pandemic, interest in local news has skyrocketed. We thought that things might level out this year as life returns to normal but instead our statistics have continued on an upward trend.

“We came incredibly close to hitting the 3 million page view mark in July, so the whole team put in that extra effort throughout August to absolutely smash past the target.

“Our focus is now on diversifying our output to include more community, heritage and sport news whilst working towards the next milestone – 6,000 articles in a single year.”