A Year in Review: Traffic, Content, and What the Numbers Say

As the year winds down, it’s time to look back at how things went from an editorial and technical perspective. The headline message is a simple one: thank you for reading. But beneath that, there are some interesting trends and hard numbers worth digging into, especially if you care about how a content-driven development site actually performs.

Thank you from Chris. Clear Ornaments hanging from the sky with gold glitten in them. A cookie candy cane embedded into the ground. Little tiny pine trees with gold stands and frosted white tips.

Traffic Dipped, But the Picture Is Mixed

The site recorded 88 million pageviews this year, a 6% drop from last year’s 93 million. That’s a move we don’t like to see, even if the metric has historically yo-yo’d within a similar range. Organic search, which accounts for 74.6% of all traffic, fell by roughly 3% — the primary driver behind the overall decline. That points to a mismatch between what we’re publishing and what people are actively searching for.

There’s a caveat worth noting on the analytics front: our own testing suggests that 20–30% of visitors are blocking the client-side Google Analytics we rely on. While that means the true traffic number could be higher, the implementation has been consistent year over year, so the downward trend still looks real.

Direct traffic rose a healthy 36%, but it only represents 5% of total visits, so it can’t offset search losses. Referral traffic fell and social grew, but both are too small to move the needle. Given that we invest well into six figures annually on fresh and updated content, a decline in traffic is discouraging — though it’s likely a symptom of intense competition in the developer writing space, which benefits us all as readers.

Interestingly, the drop in pageviews doesn’t tell the whole story. Unique visitors actually climbed to 26.3 million, up from 25.8 million. More people found the site; they just didn’t stick around as long or return as frequently. Pages per visit held steady at 1.35, confirming that most visits are a quick read-and-leave pattern. The real challenge is improving that return-visit rate.

Mobile’s Biggest Jump Yet

Mobile traffic made a significant leap this year, growing to 20% of all visits. The progression is notable:

  • 2021: 20%
  • 2020: 15%
  • 2019: 15%
  • 2018: 12%

For a reference-heavy coding site, desktop always seemed like the natural habitat. But a fifth of traffic now comes from mobile, suggesting readers are engaging with content in a more news-oriented, on-the-go fashion. That aligns nicely with the goal of being both a deep reference library and a site you check regularly for updates.

New Content Is Still King

Despite the overall dip, articles published in 2021 drove the most traffic of any single year — 13.5% of all pageviews. The best-performing 2021 posts ranged from about 71,000 to 100,000 pageviews each. The top ten:

  1. VS Code Extensions for HTML
  2. How to Create Neon Text With CSS
  3. Animating with Lottie
  4. Did You Know About the :has CSS Selector?
  5. A table with both a sticky header and a sticky first column
  6. Comparing the New Generation of Build Tools
  7. Mistakes I’ve Made as an Engineering Manager
  8. Let’s Create a Custom Audio Player
  9. HTML Inputs and Labels: A Love Story
  10. Front-End Testing is For Everyone

The next ten included solid performers on topics like CSS Grid layouts, Git commit hygiene, and even whether CSS counts as a programming language. Collectively, 44 posts crossed the 40,000-pageview mark, accounting for roughly 2.5–3 million pageviews — a healthy “medium tail” of content.

The evergreen heavyweights still dominate, though. The Complete Guide to Flexbox alone pulled in 6.7 million pageviews. Yet all 2021 content combined bested that at 11.8 million, a clear sign that continued investment in new material pays off. The takeaway is that content investment works, but it needs constant tuning — including SEO optimization for both new and existing pages — to keep overall numbers from slipping.

Here are the top ten pages overall, scoped to 2021 traffic:

  1. A Complete Guide to Flexbox
  2. A Complete Guide to Grid
  3. Perfect Full Page Background Image
  4. Using SVG
  5. The Shapes of CSS
  6. Media Queries for Standard Devices
  7. box-shadow
  8. CSS Triangle
  9. How to use @font-face in CSS
  10. How to Scale SVG

It’s encouraging to see the Almanac pages perform strongly both overall and as individual entries. The year’s numbers offer a clear roadmap: double down on what works, refine content for search, and keep finding ways to bring readers back.