The blog development report - year 2019

Let’s start with the number of unique visitors. In 2019, the blog was visited by 113,802 unique visitors. The month with the lowest number of visitors was February - 2,581 unique visitors. The month with the highest number of visitors was December - 17,443 unique visitors.

The blog has a very high bounce rate of 91,61%, which means that only 8,39% of visitors continue browsing the blog after opening the first page. This number does not surprise me - a vast majority of people find the blog using a search engine, and they visit it to find a specific solution to their problem. They find what they looked for, and they get back to their business. However, I would like to lower the bounce rate in 2020 to something like 80-85%.

There is no surprise here. The Google search engine is responsible for 91,8% traffic on the blog. The second top channel is direct traffic with 4,5% efficiency. The third top channel is the Social Media traffic with just 1,6% efficiency.

There is one interesting observation. The most engaging traffic comes from referrals - the bounce rate, in this case, is 78,04%. The least engaging channel is, of course, Organic Search with 92,22% bounce rate.

Now let’s take a look at the most popular blog posts in 2019. Here is the TOP 3:

There is one honorable mention - Jenkins Pipeline Environment Variables - The Definitive Guide which generated 5,334 pageviews, but this blog post was published on November 2nd, so it is one of the candidates for the 2020 TOP 3 ranking winner.

And here is a summary from the Search Console. At the beginning of 2019, the blog was not ranked high in the Google index. It started changing in the middle of the year, and I started seeing more and more traffic coming from Google.

And here are the TOP 10 search keywords for my blog:

Almost 20% of the traffic comes from the United States. The second country in that ranking is India with almost 9% score. The third place belongs to Germany with 6.5% score.

And here is the TOP 10:

And last but not least - the web browser ranking. Google Chrome wins with almost 80% score. Firefox is used by 12% of readers, which means that the first two browsers are used by ~92% of readers. Here is the full ranking.

Don’t expect any revolution. I want to keep blogging about the things I’m genuinely interested in. I want to blog more often, but the quality of the content is more important to me than the quantity. There is one thing I can guarantee you - the blog remains ad-free. I love the User Experience I’ve built here, and I don’t want to change that. There will be some alternative (and optional) ways to support my work, but ads are not in this category.

My goal for 2020 is to put more content on my small YouTube channel. I recorded a few new videos already, so you should see a video posted every week. (Consider subscribing if you’re not doing it already. )

And that’s it for today. I wish you a fruitful year 2020! Define your own rules and live according to them, and everything will go smoothly. Take care, and see you in the next blog post!

PS: If there is something that surprised you most regarding the 2019 performance of this blog, please let me know in the comments section down below.