2022-11-05
KTracy.com Traffic Report for October 2022
The Raw Data
Sorry for the delay in pushing out last month's traffic report. Despite the not-so-great numbers, we actually weren't intentionally stalling. We were simply delayed by preparing the Kevin Tracy Archives for 2001 and pushing that online. It unexpectedly led to some meetings about changing our current KTracy.com layout and design to match some of the ingenious things Kevin Tracy did back in 2001 with his original website.
As mentioned, we're not thrilled with the traffic statistics. Almost every day of October was worse than September; which was really disappointing. Here are the raw numbers for your use and analysis.
| Month | Unique Visitors | Number of Visits | Pages | Hits | Bandwidth |
| Jul 2022 | 1,783 | 4,206 | 17,135 | 21,851 | 218.14 MB |
| Aug 2022 | 1,454 | 3,295 | 14,952 | 20,597 | 389.21 MB |
| Sep 2022 | 1,489 | 3,137 | 14,681 | 21,522 | 368.19 MB |
| Oct 2022 | 1,259 | 2,684 | 13,575 | 22,043 | 539.87 MB |
Excuse 1: Sitemap Woes
We felt like some good content was made in October and we're generally happy with most of the SEO changes we made in the month. However, if we had to pick a culprit responsible for the drop in traffic, we think it might be the Sitemap we added back in late September. We actually saw this coming pretty early in October, but we wanted to ride it out to see if this was a long term trend before making any sudden changes.
Essentially, if you read the sitemap article back in September, we discussed how the sitemaps were being manually generated. What I think we failed to consider was how the home page and archives page functioned as a automatically updated sitemap on their own. Now that KTracy.com has an official XML sitemap that isn't updated automatically, thinking the web crawlers aren't crawling KTracy.com often enough to index the almost daily content we're creating.
So, later this month, we're going to get rid of the sitemap and see what happens.
Excuse 2: Non-Perennial Content
Honestly, the numbers might have been worse had we not added a few more product reviews at the end of the month. In addition to the Logitech MK850 keyboard and mouse review we did back in August, the recently added review for the Maono studio microphone has also outperformed expectations. This likely means we're going to be posting more product reviews moving forward in an effort to develop perennial content that doesn't become outdated in a matter of weeks.
To that end, Kevin Tracy is also going to be putting effort into the Issues section. Kevin is going to lay out his position on serious and some non-serious social, political, theological, and philosophical topics that will guide the ethics of KTracy.com and provide some more of that sweet perennial content that can be heavily linked to in the vast majority of written posts on the site.
Excuse 3: The CSS Not Updating For Existing Viewers
One problem we've been aware of is that with all the changes to KTracy.com, most of them have been made in the site's CSS. The CSS file is a stylesheet that allows us to set a uniform look across the site. However, CSS files are notorious for caching really hard and not updating for viewers once they're changed. We haven't actually ever tried to address this issue, so there may be some visitors today that are using the June CSS file. We've obviously made a lot of choices since then, so using that old CSS file will likely result in a site that appears broken or ugly. We actually fixed the problem last night and plan on sharing the code to do that sometime in the next week.
Excuse 4: Lack of End-of-Month Contact
Another possible problem we've had with traffic was spending the last part of the month was the staff getting the 2001 archives ready and Kevin drawing the KTracy.com Staff portraits. However, it's difficult to blame this for much since every day visitors were down pretty consistently all month. In fact, there was only one day when we cracked 100 unique daily visitors in October; which is pretty atrocious. By contrast, we only had 8 days in September where we failed to hit the 100 daily visitor threshold. More end of month content might have softened the blow in the monthly traffic statistics with a few more unique visitors, but the damage was done throughout the entire month.
Looking to November
This report is coming out slightly later than normal, so we have some insight into November already. The low traffic levels seen in October continued on the first and second of the month. However, the third cracked 100 unique views and the fourth actually cracked 200 unique views!
It's a bit early to celebrate success in November, though. Our biggest concern for November is eliminating the sitemap. In theory, this should work fine. What we don't know is if or how Google and other search engines will punish us for removing it. It's possible search engine traffic will plummet as we get rid of this feature and let the crawlers rely on good, old fashioned crawling to get all of their links.
