THE Dorset Echo website has seen record-breaking figures during January.

More than 250,000 people clicked on to dorsetecho.co.uk to catch up on the latest breaking news, to find out what’s happening in the area and to see our picture galleries.

The website received a total of 2,262,510 page views throughout the month, which is a 33 per cent increase on last year’s figures for the same month, and a 41 per cent increase on page views from December.

Top stories included our ‘Storms Latest’ live blog which ran throughout the busiest days of the severe weather warnings; the ancient rock stack that was destroyed on Portland by the high seas and road closures during the flooding.

Our story on celebrity couple Zayn Malik from One Direction and Perrie Edwards from Little Mix celebrating the New Year in Weymouth also attracted tens of thousands of readers.

The busiest days for website traffic were January 3 and January 7. January 3 was the first day of the severe flood warnings for Chiswell on Portland and Preston Beach Road, Weymouth.

January 7 was the day after the sirens sounded at Chiswell on Portland at 11pm, warning residents of severe weather.

People living on the island were given the option of evacuating or moving to upstairs rooms as 15ft waves threatened to flood Chiswell.

Picture galleries, specifically the New Year’s Eve picture gallery and the storm picture gallery, got one third of all website traffic for the month.

The Your Say letters page also got 23,680 views.

The Dorset Echo website received 256,914 unique browsers online, which topped last year’s figures by 68,724 people.

Toby Granville, group editor said: “I’d like to thank every one of the 256,914 readers who visited our website in January and made it an amazing record-breaking month. More and more readers are visiting our website because our talented team of journalists are producing the very best exclusives – as well as reporting the big breaking stories online live from the scene all around the county."