The Story of Crushing Krisis in Page Views (or: Wow, The X-Men Are Really Popular) (Patreon)

Unfortunately, my first six years of site statistics are lost to time and unreliable SaaSes, but I do have all of my pageview statistics starting from my launch on WordPress in November 2006 - 10 years ago!

The blue line on the chart is my total page views, red are views only of the homepage of Crushing Krisis, and yellow are views of ANY of the many X-Men pages at CK.

The first thing you might notice is “Whoa, CK really exploded in 2013 and 2014!” That’s true - I can now sometimes have as much traffic in one day as I had in one month prior to 2013.

The second thing you could point out is, “Wow, and then the end of 2015 was terrible!”

Yes, it definitely was. I’ll get back to that in a moment.

The X-Men guides started finding readers less than a year after their 2010 launch and continued to account for the majority of all of my traffic until May 2014  AKA The Great Spike - long after I had started adding more guides.

What happened in May 2014 that caused an explosion of traffic and saw the X-Men guides representing only half of total page views? I can’t entirely explain it. It’s not linked to any single page or referrer. The rising tide lifted all ships, which points to an update in Google’s algorithm that benefited me.

From there, traffic stayed high for over a year, until the Great Crash of August 2015 AKA when Google changed their algorithm again. The change did not affect all of my pages, as you can see by the fact that the X-Men guide page views did not dip in proportion to overall page views, but it did hurt a few of my highest traffic guides.

Despite Great Crash, my baseline of traffic remained higher than it had been before May of 2014. I believe that can be attributed to the fact that my unique visitors (each one of you!) dipped slightly but stayed relatively consistent.

Basically, I only lost a small portion of users arriving off of Google Search who were diving deeply into the site to create many page views. While it's tough to lose them, my core audience remained intact. Regular regulars (like you!) were still faithfully showing up at least once a month.

(This chart also helps provide context to the Great Spike of May 2014: my retention rate for returning visitors DOUBLED between April 2014 to June 2014 and never again fell off.)

The Great Crash made me realize that I needed to do more proactive work to get CK in front of new viewers and to maintain longtime readers. It’s no coincidence that traffic began to bounce back my second month as a stay-at-home parent (even while I wasn’t doing any new posting, I was shoring things up behind the scenes).

Several strong months of posting got me back to record highs over the summer of 2016 before the school year in September, which always represents a dip in traffic. And, for the first time ever, the CK homepage contributed more than just a blip of page views!

All of this history is also a map of what I want to change in the future, including:

• I need to rely less on Google Organic visitors; they should shrink as a percentage
• I must diversify the pages that bring in the most visits so that taking a major hit to the traffic of one page doesn't have as much net impact on my data.
• I should do more to capitalize on my strong retention rates for returning users.
• I need to keep up my efforts on the editorial side to make the homepage an increasingly larger destination, since that will generate more page views and sessions than a relatively static collecting guide.