UPDATE JULY 28, 2022: STATISTICS FOR JUNE 2022 ARE UNDERREPORTED DUE TO A PROBLEM IN THE .HTACCESS FILE NOT FORCING HTTPS ON ALL INCOMING TRAFFIC.

One of the primary reasons Kevin Tracy abandoned WordPress for static HTML/PHP/CSS was because he was worried about how web traffic was hurt by the slow speed of WordPress on his shared server. With each iteration, the bigger the KTracy.com blog became on WordPress, the slower the website became. He longed for the good old days of near-instantaneous load speeds rendered by pure HTML.

To track progress in this regard, Kevin Tracy has asked the staff to report on the monthly web traffic statistics for his personal website.

June 2022's report is a bit strange in that KTracy.com was effectively offline from late December until June 14th of this year. So as you would expect, traffic numbers are a bit stunted from what we would expect.

Kevin Tracy has asked us to report on the above statics for specific reasons.

• Unique Visits - This tracks the raw number of people visiting KTracy.com; which is a measure of our reach and influence.
• Page Loads - This tracks how many unique pages are opened by visitors to KTracy.com. The ratio of unique visits to pages opened tells Kevin Tracy how engaged our readers are with the content, if they come back for more, and how entertained they are.
• Bandwidth - Bandwidth is a measure of how much data is being transferred both on the server to pull the data from the archives and then deliver that to our visitors. It may seem counterintuitive, but we actually want to keep the ratio of page loads to bandwidth as small as possible. The less bandwidth we use for each request, the faster pages will load. Again, this was a major reason Kevin Tracy began investigating alternatives to WordPress.

How does this data compare to WordPress-era statistics?

Again, these numbers are still early. KTracy.com was using WordPress consistently from 2015 through the beginning of 2021, so there was a tremendous amount of content that was drawing in visitors that KTracy.com does not have at the moment (some of it will eventually be added to the Kevin Tracy Archives). However, after a half month of being back online after a long hiatus, we are satisfied with the results.

Although we had more unique visits and pages views in June 2020 than June 2022, we are convinced this is an improvement because KTracy.com didn't go online until June 14th, almost halfway through the month.

Here are the ratios with some analysis below:

June 2022 Page Views per Unique Visitor: 4.17
June 2020 Page Views per Unique Visitor: 4.28

June 2022 Bandwidth per Page Load: 0.006 MB
June 2020 Bandwidth per Page Load: 0.021 MB

Kevin Tracy and the KTracy.com Ministry of Propaganda were initially surprised by the Page Views per unique visit being higher in WordPress. When we went to the basement to investigate this further, the developers and programmers keeping KTracy.com online offered two possible explanations. The first explanation was the overall quantity of content on the old site. Simply put, there were simply a lot more pages to load and find. The recommendation here is just to keep creating new content and referencing old content in new content that is created. Likewise, it was advised that we begin going back to old content and adding links to new content to make that data more relevant to web crawlers looking for updated pages. The second and more likely explanation was that in June 2020, the KTracy.com Store was included in the KTracy.com stats. As visitors browsed the store, they added more page loads to their visit. Today, the KTracy.com store is a separate website and not included in our statistics.

Finally, Kevin Tracy was thrilled that we are using less than a third of the bandwidth per page load during the WordPress era. This indicates that page loads are happening more than three times faster using HTML and CSS rather than WordPress and their massive databases. However, our experience so far has been that the current version of KTracy.com is loading even faster than this. We attribute this to the fact that there aren't any databases at all and the database queue times are non-existent.

Overall, we're happy with the transition away from WordPress and back to static web pages. This half month has some rather promising traffic statistics and we're looking forward to the start of August to see how the addition of more content and a full month impact the data.