Hurray! We’re halfway through the year!
June went by incredibly quickly for me. My wife and I are currently in the process of buying a home, so it feels like we’ve been running all over the place. The stress. My goodness, the stress.
Anyway, the site is chugging along as always, so let’s talk about it.
June Analytics
It’s kind of crazy to say this for another month in a row…but we set a new record! Crazy, right?
The site hit a new monthly high in unique users at 25,229, which beat out the old record by approximately 701 (old record was 24,528). Another high note is that, compared to last month, new users are also up. It’s always a good thing to have new users visit the site, even if it is just 2%.
The average session duration is still hovering around 4:00, which is the sweet spot for me. Something I always get excited about is bounce rate. I really want visitors to my site to give it a chance before leaving, so seeing the bounce rate drop to 22.14% last month from 24.69% is really awesome. I’m super happy with that number.
Taking a quick look at new versus returning visitors, we still have the pretty standard (for the site) split of 25% new to 75% returning. This month, we had a few more new users which tipped the scale by about 1.5%.
All in all, I’m happy with the results from last month.
June Improvements
I didn’t have a whole lot of commits this past month, which seems to be an unhealthy trend as of late. What can I say, you keep busy when you get married, work, and buy a house.
1270 Anime
I added the previous season’s (Spring 2019) anime to the website, along with some randoms that I had found and wrote down. This brings the total of the website up to 1270. I really, really want to get to 1300. Why? I don’t know, I just want to!
Named List Experiment
I started a little experiment with pages I’m calling “named” lists. As of right now, these lists are only accessible via search engine. So they would have to show up in a Google search in order to gain traffic.
These “named” lists have themes, such as “anime that make you cry” or “anime with epic fight scenes”. There is a little blurb, and then a custom list that shows anime that fit the theme. I figured it was worth a shot and it was something different.
So far, there are only three, but I am working on a few more. I wouldn’t say they didn’t meet my expectations, but I definitely need to think about the implementation better. They got indexed, but aren’t really bringing much traffic.
Who knows. We’ll see.
What’s Next?
Well, as I said previously, I really want to get to 1300 anime. I think that will be a cool milestone that I can give myself a nice pat on the back over. I’ve already gone through and done my content check for July, so that’s good.
I gotta admit, I’m getting the itch again. It’s been a long while since the website has had a fresh design. I’ve re-coded the website a few times, but the design aspect is really only the second version. It’s had the same look for most of its life.
I want to update the design to be something really modern and clean looking (two words that graphic designers hate, by the way). I’m not putting a lot of pressure on myself; I’m just sort of messing around with different designs and seeing if something strikes my fancy.
That’s about it for the website. July is going to be crazy! We have Anime Midwest this weekend, a friend’s wedding, a concert, and so much more going on. I can’t wait. It’s going to be a great month.
I hope everyone has a great holiday!
Thanks for reading.