A Year of Milestones and an AI-Sized Speed Bump
The numbers this year tell a story that’s equal parts triumphant and sobering. We hit some serious editorial milestones, but 2025 also brought the full force of an AI-driven internet reality check. Let’s get into the data, the work, and the gratitude.
Traffic: The Big Drop
There’s no dancing around it. We recorded 20 million unique views in 2025, a significant drop from last year’s 26 million. The cliff is sharpest in July, right when Google began injecting AI summaries at the top of its search results. Year-over-year we’re down 23%, but the month-over-month impact during that period was closer to 30%.
It’s a painful hit, but it’s not isolated. This aligns with what I’m hearing from other publishers in the space. The fundamental dynamics of digital publishing have changed. We adapt, we focus on what we control—producing the best front-end content we can—and we appreciate every single one of you who keeps showing up to read it.
By the Numbers: Publishing and the Almanac
The editorial output has seen a massive resurgence. To put 2025 in context:
- 2020: 1,183 articles
- 2021: 890 articles (site acquired by DigitalOcean)
- 2022: 390 articles
- 2023: 0 articles (site paused)
- 2024: 153 articles (site resumed in late June)
This year, we’re looking at 255 articles published. That’s almost one for every weekday of the year, which puts us right on track to hit exactly 261 articles by the time the calendar flips. Treat us as your weekday work companion.
Where did that energy go? Into the Almanac. We added 101 new Almanac entries so far (one for each Dalmatian, as it were), with more on the way. This is the largest single-year infusion we’ve ever managed. While MDN offers excellent documentation, our goal is to explain features like one developer talking to another. Where else are you going to enjoy a deep dive into a trigonometry function like atan2()?
The Almanac Gets a Spring Cleaning
The Almanac has historically been our home for CSS properties and pseudo-elements. Last year, we expanded its scope to cover the entire spectrum of CSS, adding sections for functions, selectors, and at-rules. In 2025, we finished the job. We’re confident we’ve covered every single at-rule this year, and we’ve grown the functions section from a starting point of zero to a robust 64 entries.
The user experience got an upgrade as well. Now, you can get a high-level summary of a feature directly from the index pages without clicking through to the full article:
We’ve also added clear labels for experimental and shorthand properties:
And for shorthands, you can now drill down into their constituent properties:
We even added a touch of modern flair with some scroll-driven animations on the pages to keep things lively.
The Crew
None of this happens without an incredible team. Last year, I introduced you to Juan Diego Rodriguez and Ryan Trimble, who continue to be invaluable as my second and third pairs of eyes. This year, we’ve added a fourth.
Danny Schwarz has stepped up from long-time contributor to help us stay on top of the fast-moving CSS landscape. He’s channeling his hawk-like attention into What’s !Important, a new bi-weekly digest of notable web platform updates. The first edition is out, and you can also follow his Quick Hits feed for more frequent news snippets.
Checking Our 2025 Homework
Let’s review the goals we set for ourselves last year.
✅ Publish 1-2 new guides. We smashed this one back in June. We released both CSS Color Functions and CSS Counters.
✅ Fill in the Almanac. A massive understatement. With 104 new pages added this year, this goal is more than complete. The work from contributors like Juan Diego, Danny, Sunkanmi Fafowora, John Rhea, and Gabriel Shoyombo has been phenomenal.
🚫 Restart the newsletter. We failed here, but not for lack of trying. Administrative hurdles behind the scenes are the blocker. It’s a part of the site I miss, and we won’t give up. Perhaps it evolves into something like What’s !Important.
🔶 More guest authors. We’ll give this a passing grade. We welcomed talented folks like Andy Clarke, Mat Marquis, and Blackle Mori, but I’d like to see a fresh set of faces every month. The door is always open for guest submissions.
Looking Ahead
For 2026, the goals are largely a carry-over. Recovering all the lost traffic is only mildly in our control, so the focus remains on consistency: serving fresh, educational content every day. If I had a magic wand, we’d add full online courses to the offering. The interactive learning experience is something I value, and it would be a great addition to the site’s ecosystem.
Gratitude All Around
My thanks go out to the team, the readers, and very much to DigitalOcean. Their backing is what keeps the engine running. They operate CSS-Tricks with the spirit of an independent publication—no product jamming, no editorial meddling—which is a rare and valuable thing. A special shout out to Roxie Elliott, whose behind-the-scenes help has been incredibly valuable.
It’s been a year of ups and downs, but we have plenty to be thankful for as we head into the site’s 19th birthday in July 2026. Nineteen years is a long time in internet years. And of course, a final thank you to Chris Coyier, who started it all.
