Carl Sven

Ministry of Information Technology

2022-12-04

You Like Your Data Raw

Sitemap Removal Helped

We eliminated the manual sitemaps we created early in November. As mentioned in the October report, we were worried the sitemaps being outdated and updated only every couple of weeks was telling search engines that there was nothing new on KTracy.com. That negatively affected our search rankings. Instead, we decided to use the Archives page as a functional HTML sitemap. We'll share how we're doing that later in the month because it's worked incredibly.

What we've learned from this is that manually updating a sitemap is for chumps. Sitemaps are great if you can generate them automatically when new content is created. However, if you have a regularly updated static site, sitemaps are more trouble than they're worth.

Bandwidth per Visit Increasing

It seems like every month, the bandwidth per hit and bandwidth per visit and per hit keep going up. This month, we hit 36.5 KB per hit and 350.36 KB per visit. Interestingly, the 36.5 KB/Hit is actually more than several months from 2020 when we were running WordPress. This does confirm a theory we had about Awstats statistics that it doesn't measure server bandwidth, only downloads. Therefore, the size of the data being downloaded wasn't the problem with download speed on WordPress. The problem was the size of the database and the limits of the shared server trying to pull that data. Our page load speeds are still significantly faster than WordPress, even in the photo galleries.

We did notice this trend of increasing bandwidth last month. We suspected this might have been caused by the increasing number of photo galleries. So, early in November, we downscaled the images in the photography section of the Kevin Tracy Museum of Art and Photography. The result was that the images were typically only 10% of the original size. This isn't great for printing, but it's more than optimal for web viewing. The full size photos are being maintained on KTracy.com network servers.

Pages Per Visit Continue To Increase

Another great stat is that the average number of pages per visit has increased every month since June 2022. It's also significantly higher than it was in 2021 when this site was first re-launched. This is actually fantastic news as it means that although we had slightly less traffic in 2022 than in 2021, the quality of the traffic we're getting is significantly better. More people are coming to KTracy.com and navigating to other content on the site.

This is another really important metric for success on a website and we're thrilled to report consistent positive trends. At some point, the traffic will level off; but until that happens, we're going to be keeping a really close eye on this stat.

5.18 pages per visit is really exceptional!

Future Growth Ideas

As I discussed in the upcoming design changes update for December, we've been focusing quite a bit on IndieWeb functionality in our code. I don't think anything is going to be ready this month, but I'm hopeful we'll be able to modify our templates to automatically make new content compatible with IndieWeb readers and hopefully lay the groundwork for webmention support. By implementing Indieweb on the site, we'll be in a better postion to talk about is implementation on a static site; which will hopefully provide some perennial content.

The real benefit we hope to actualize with this is the ability to share KTracy.com content without the use of big-tech social media platforms.

We're also going to continue to prioritize building the content library by getting the archives online. Once those archives are online, we'll be able to push for new content types, including the long awaited return to video production and podcasting.

The KTracy.com staff is committed to the long game. We're going to grind to get everything, including old photo galleries, online. Once this is done, we're going to be firing on all cylinders.