Last month my blog had experienced a few issues, which in the end affected the amount of traffic to my blog. The issues involved my blog experiencing downtime throughout the month. For the most part the downtime was between a few minutes and less than an hour, there was a longer downtime that had an impact on my traffic levels.
Besides the downtime, which I will explain below, my traffic throughout September was pretty consistent, but I am always striving to consistently increase my traffic each month.
Blog Downtime Issue
Before I get into the issue with my blog experiencing downtime, lets look at traffic levels through September 2011 for Technically Easy.
(Click to enlarge)
As you can see from the above chart, the traffic levels were fairly consistent except for September 13th and 14th. Excluding those dates, the amount of traffic that Technically Easy received was good and comparable to the previous few months.
For September, the traffic numbers were as follows, along with a comparison with a year ago:
| Metric | September 2010 | September 2011 | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Visits | 53,416 | 86,895 | 62.68% |
| Pageviews | 71,341 | 117,506 | 64.71% |
The one thing that I am noticing is my year-over-year increase isn’t has high as it was for the previous few months, but near the end of last year my traffic numbers were increasing. This may mean that going forward the increases will start to become lower. I don’t mind as long as there is a good year-over-year increase.
On September 13th something was changed on my host and my blog went offline. Unfortunately, I didn’t realize the problem until about midday the next day, so my blog had been down for almost 24 hours.
I’m not really too sure what had caused the problem, but I used the Live Chat feature for my host and about an hour later the problem was corrected. Not only was my traffic affected, but my earnings for those two days was also impacted. This incident also reminded me that it is important to check on your blog once in a while to ensure everything is up and running.
Traffic Sources
The one consistency with my blog that I have seen for the past few years is the sources of my traffic. Search engine traffic accounted for over 87% of the visits to my blog, with direct traffic coming in second at 6.62% and referrals in third at 5.69%. The chart below shows the breakdown.
(Click to enlarge)
While I have been looking for ways to increase my direct and referring traffic numbers, I am still happy with the amount of traffic from search engines. My only concern is that if search engines change their algorithm and my pages don’t rank as well, I could lose a significant portion of my traffic.
I’ll have to continue to work on other traffic means, but in the mean time I’ll continue to increase my traffic numbers of next month.