• Menu

Another Year of “Merci” and Numbers to Close 2015

Thank you!
Thank you!

As the year draws to a close, “top something of 2015” started to pop up everywhere—top books, top news, top podcasts, top movies, top Tweets, top articles, you name it.

It’s a year-end tradition.

We can’t help it.

Our brains love lists, a format that gets to the point and helps us organize what otherwise seems overwhelming—namely the online world and information overload. During the holiday season, we are generally busier (and occasionally drunk) so we look for easy-to-digest formats.

Lists also provide reassurance that we did accomplish something over the past twelve months—and the very best of that “something” is here for the world to see.

I will indulge. My turn. Here are a few blog-related highlights for 2015.

This year, the stats were very strange, with a sudden huge drop in traffic late in May. It’s slowly climbing back up but I’m still wondering how and why I broke the Internet last spring. Like the song says, “it must have been something I said”. Or not. I never truly understood statistics—let alone those applied to my tiny corner of the Web—and SEO remains that mysterious science tons of spammers want to improve for me (yes, I ignore them).

I’m still happy with the mobile-friendly theme I adopted last year. I made a few tweaks but nothing major—I focus on readability and frankly, after ten years of blogging, the novelty of editing HTML and PHP files “just because” ran out.

A little while ago, I reorganized the navigation bar, highlighting two broad categories and their associated drop-down menu. Life in Canada has all the immigration-related info, and Life on the Road lists all of our trips plus the Food Around the World section.

Here are the quick stats as of late December 2015:

  • 1,708 articles published since October 2006
  • 24,542 comments
  • 340,605 page views for from January to December 2015
  • 205 articles for the entire year of 2015

Users were mostly from:

  1. Canada
  2. United States
  3. India
  4. United Kingdom
  5. Philippines
  6. France
  7. Australia
  8. United Arab Emirates
  9. China
  10. Singapore

The top queries were:

  • Canadian things
  • Baby walker Canada
  • Entertaining websites
  • Chinese sex stories
  • Canadian souvenirs
  • Group deals

And finally, the top ten most viewed articles in 2015 were:

Most importantly, thank you all for reading and for your support. I could totally write articles without you… but it would suck.

Now let’s get ready for 2016!

Share this article!
Zhu

French woman in English Canada.

Exploring the world with my camera since 1999, translating sentences for a living, writing stories that may or may not get attention.

Firm believer that nobody is normal... and it’s better this way.

View stories

Leave a Reply to I Say Oui Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

11 comments