Visitor Traffic Increase

I noticed some­thing unusual in my web­site sta­tis­tics this morn­ing. Traf­fic to this blog had jumped from around an aver­age of 50 vis­i­tors a day to almost 600 vis­i­tors per day since Sep­tem­ber 20th. I’m still try­ing to fig­ure out what exactly caused this spike.

Lunarlog Sta­tis­tics.

The only other times I’ve seen larger spikes is when some of my work was fea­tured on NPR, The Atlantic, Giz­modo, and The Wall Street Jour­nal. The num­bers had jumped close to 8,000 vis­i­tors per day then dropped back down.

A traf­fic increase is a pos­i­tive thing for any con­cerned author on the Inter­net as long as it doesn’t crash your web­site host­ing ser­vice provider. The whole point of run­ning a site in the first place is for peo­ple to find what you are writ­ing about or pro­mot­ing. So, there’s no com­plaints on my end — I’m just try­ing to fig­ure out what exactly hap­pened because I’m really curi­ous. I tried look­ing at my logs and couldn’t pin­point where vis­i­tors were com­ing from and what they were look­ing at.

Relatively-speaking, this site isn’t meant to be pop­u­lar and the traf­fic spike isn’t any­thing remark­able com­pared to some much larger and more pop­u­lar web­sites. I don’t think (nor would I ever intend) that the top­ics I choose to dis­cuss here would be inter­est­ing to most peo­ple. It’s meant to be infor­ma­tive for peo­ple search­ing out spe­cific needs and design-related infor­ma­tion, while attempt­ing to cross-promote my art­work at LunarStudio.com. I tend to focus more on smaller niches of writ­ing and unique­ness of con­tent, rather than some other blogs which try to tackle one major topic (ie. food-related blogs, motor­cy­cles, etc.) A slight diver­sity in top­ics seems to cast a much wider net when it comes to search engines, although speci­ficity also has its own time and place. I sup­pose what you choose to write really depends on what you want from a tar­get audi­ence. My main work is illustration-related, and it’s such a broad field that work can come from any num­ber of directions.

I think sev­eral dif­fer­ent things might have caused the traf­fic jump:

1. The redesign of Lunarlog which could have led to faster load times, bet­ter code syn­tax, and a more pleas­ant expe­ri­ence to end-users.
2. A link from a pop­u­lar web­site to this one.
3. A link from a pop­u­lar web­site which con­tains a pop­u­lar arti­cle to this one.
4. A pop­u­lar topic which I might have recently writ­ten about.
5. New blog arti­cle posts which Google trig­gers (they like fresh content.)
6. Incor­po­rat­ing rel=“author” syntax.
7. Removal of some Word­Press plugins.
8. Addi­tion of some Word­Press plugins.

In gen­eral, traf­fic spikes usu­ally come from one or two resources, but other sites might pick up on some­thing inter­est­ing and start link­ing to you as well. Spikes and traf­fic acts like a pyra­mid when it comes to link­ing, but hope­fully this remains a plateau. It might be a few more days before I can come up with some solid answers.