WordPress Stats, Yo

[deirdre]

I’m sharing my WordPress annual report.

tl;dr version:

1. Almost 1/4 million views.
2. Over 23,000 in a single day, the day after I posted the Marion Zimmer Bradley story. Several weeks before The Guardian article, btw.
3. 4 of the top 5 stories were related to MZB; the fifth’s related to Ellora’s Cave.

Fascinating that the post about supporting authors who have non-EC works is more popular than all my other posts about Ellora’s Cave—by a wide margin.

Best Move I Made This Year

My blog would not have survived the most popular day (nor several other popular days) without the excellent services of my hosting provider, WP Engine. They’re not cheap but you get:

1. A staging area so you have a place to test and goof up. And wipe in a moment if you want to (or need to).
2. Automagic daily backups, and easy-to-create other backups at will.
3. When I had a security issue (my site was defaced after I visited a site with a malicious script), they copied over my site to a third staging area and had a security team look at it. My site was able to be immediately restored, and I had peace of mind knowing my site itself didn’t have security issues.
4. Note that my number of visitors, divided by twelve, almost exactly fits into the personal plan at WP Engine. Almost. The post-May stats were a lot higher than the first half of the year. Most months, I have an overage of a few dollars.

Originally published at deirdre.net. You can comment here or there.