A Tale of Two Halves: My WordPress Stats for 2021

Blogging, family, happiness, humor, lessons learned, rankings, reading, technology, writing 2 Minutes

If you’re still reading this post, I guess the phrase “My WordPress Stats” wasn’t enough to scare you off. So now you’re obligated to read the rest…

As you can see from the right side of the graph above, the views from the first six months of 2021 were all higher than the last six months of the year, except for December. But that spike in December can be explained by a one-day freakish jump in views, when I had over 5,000 views.

Despite the drop in view in the second half of the year, I was still able to post my sixth straight year of an increasing number of views for the year, as shown by the chart below:

But that trend appears in danger, given what has happened the past six months.

If you look at the chart below, I thought I had this blogging thing figured out beginning in October of 2020. That was the start of four straight months of over 20,000 views per month, peaking with my highest month ever in January of 2021, except for another freakish day back in May of 2020, when I had over 10,000 views (yes, thanks to tires and legos).

Halfway through 2021, I was projecting I’d have over 250,000 views for the year, but as you can see from the yearly graph, I ended just short of 210,000 views for the year.

Now don’t get me wrong. I was quite excited to break 200,000 – especially knowing that in 2015, my first year of blogging, I had 18,500 views.

The final chart I will show is of likes, comments, and words per post.

2021 was a good year in terms of increased engagement compared to 2020. Average comments per post were nearly 60 and the average number of likes was 61. It may be that these increases are the result of the average length of my blog posts dropping from 451 words per post in 2020 to 428 words in 2021.

I guess that suggests that if I can get my posts below 10 words, people will really like my blog…

This chart also reminds me of how long it took me to get some engagement on my blog. You will notice that for the first four years of my blog I averaged less than two comments per post, and less than one like per post.

It’s hard to say what may have caused the increase in engagement beginning in 2019, but I think part of it was my decision to move from using wordpress.org to using wordpress.com, which seemed to make it easier to become part of the blogging community.

And speaking of community, thank you to all of you who have viewed, liked, or commented on any of my posts this year, as well as in past years. The WordPress community is a wonderful one to be part of, and I look forward to continuing that engagement with both “old bloggers” and meeting some new ones.

P.S. the countdown to breaking Cal Ripkens’s record is now 75 days…

 

Published by Jim Borden

A 60-something guy trying to figure out the world, and his place in it. Happily married for 40-plus years, three wonderful sons. Accounting teacher, fitness enthusiast, blogger, reader.

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67 thoughts on “A Tale of Two Halves: My WordPress Stats for 2021”

  2. Those are some pretty huge stats–about 10X mine. We’ve been blogging about the same amount of time, but I only blog around 8 times per month compared to your daily posts. I’m sure your consistency helps build your readership. One thing I’m sure of though is I don’t want 60 comments a day. I’ve seen a fall off of late as well. I’ve had some fairly dramatic attrition in my readership and some of my favorite long time blogging friends have disappeared from wordpress altogether.

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    1. of those 60 comments, usually about half are mine. but it is a bit of work to keep up with. I’ve seen some bloggers with twice as many comments – that seems like a lot of work!

      I can’t explain the drop off in numbers, hopefully they pick up again. for both of us!

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  3. Wow those are definitely some impressive numbers. I’m not going to tell you mine but I will give you a hint, my yearly views are probably what you see in a week lol.🤣🤣 I’ll catch up one day……hopefully 😁

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  4. I’m guessing the jump from org to com did the trick. How else to explain it? You seem to be up there in the stratosphere of great stats, now. I think there should be blogger cards, similar to baseball cards, with your logo on the front, and all your best stats on the back.

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  8. Just a friendly warning—Ripken has been taking some batting practice lately once he heard you were threatening his record.

    Maybe you should start a new stat about how many days in a row you can blog about your stats. For the record, I have the count at 2.

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  13. I’ve read the post, ‘liked’ it, and am now commenting. Just doing my bit to get 2022’s stats off to a flying start. As far as word count goes, you’re on your own there, I’m afraid 😊

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      1. Do you think that the word count makes a difference? I’d have thought it was more likely to be the content that mattered, not the volume of it. I’ve been looking at my own stats in preparing my annual review, and my average word count per post is way higher than yours. Maybe that explains why I only get about a ninth of your page views? 😂

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      2. I’m not sure; I vaguely recall some blogger writing that Google favors posts that are around 750-1000 words. If I can find the reference I will share it. That’s why I want to start trying to increase mine to see if the riews start increasing again…

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      5. I don’t really know. Whatever I do I seem to get similar figures: occasional peaks and troughs, though a rise overall in the past few years. I can only dream of figures like those you get!

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  14. I’m not much of a stats person, but I do enjoy seeing where in the world people are reading my blog. this is why we have you, Jim, we need a pro-level stats guy. perhaps you could start a side business helping people to analyze their wp stats, hopefully I’ll get a percentage for the idea. seems like you’re on a generally upward trend so just try to relax and enjoy the ride. I’m doing my part right now by responding to your blog!

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  20. My views have been going downhill the past two years but that’s because I have not been posting and engaging as much. Do you plan on writing a ‘how to get more views’ or something like that post? I laughed at your ‘fewer than 10 words’ posts. That’s my conclusion, too.

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    1. I’m not sure what has caused my drop in the past few months. I had one post from few years ago that I could count on getting at least 1,000 views per month from, but that seemed to get cut in half starting about six months ago. I couldn’t write a blog post about how to get more views, since I have no idea how to do so!

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  21. Jim, your stats reveal your success in bringing more readers to your blog. Congratulations! Being a much smaller fish in the WP pond, I have been impressed with the viewership of my site in recent months. As for Cal Ripken’s streak, he won’t be sweating my more modest one.

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  22. Those really are some monster stats. I think I’ll need to up my post frequency just to experiment what that does to my viewership. Also, it’s so interesting how you had 1k+ hits a month even on .org, since you won’t be featured on the Reader there. Thanks for sharing, Jim. You’re very generous for this!

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  25. My eyes almost popped out when I saw 365 posts in your first year! Great Job! Your consistency and dedication is clearly paying off 🙌. My 2021 blog stats is scheduled to go up on Wednesday, I want to post it but this is the one time I’m hoping people don’t view my post😅 . Thanks for your transparency 👏

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