The title, which recently completed an extensive redesign of its website, recorded 20,622,063 unique users in July – just beating the 20,499,858 unique visitors to the site in June.
Year-on-year comparisons suggest a 28.4 per cent growth in unique users to Guardian.co.uk. Page impressions on the site also rose month-on-month by 1.8 per cent to 186,430,603 for July.
Despite a 16.8 per cent rise in unique users for Mail Online from 16,015,211 in June to 18,705,552 last month, the site remained in third place behind Telegraph.co.uk, which attracted 18,746,025 unique users – a drop of 4.9 per cent from 19,712,622 in June.
The Telegraph site has, however, increased its unique users by 108.5 per cent when compared with the ABCe report for July 2007.
Mail Online has also seen strong year-on-year growth with a 57.7 per cent increase in unique users from 11,865,039 recorded in its July 2007 audit.
The number of page impressions for Dailymail.co.uk rose from 119,483,455 in June to 143,587,842 last month, while Telegraph.co.uk's page impressions fell from 151,857,375 to 140,318,137
News International's Sun and Times websites both saw slight gains in the number of unique users, according to the ABCe report.
Unique visitors to Times Online rose by just 21,894 to 16,391,514, while the Sun's unique users increased by 2.98 per cent from June to 15,972,490.
Page impressions for both titles also grew with 123,978,303 for Times Online – a rise of 6,235,015 from June; and 292,031,461 for the Sun's site – an increase of 929,180 from the previous figures.
The Independent posted the greatest fall in unique users of the national newspaper websites audited monthly by the ABCe.
In comparison with June's figures, the site attracted 626,999 (8.69 per cent) fewer unique users with a total of 6,588,929 for July.
Unique users of Mirror.co.uk fell by 249,090 (4.6 per cent) in July from 5,426,320 in June to 5,177,230.
Mirror Group Digital also posted a slight drop in unique users to its network of websites from 5,426,320 in June to 5,177,230 last month.
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