To help me reflect on my blog, I decided to try something new for me: to look at the statistics I have and establish the first mark to measure if my blog is useful to others. 🙈
As I didn't want to use Google Analytics, I choose a lightweight alternative named Umami. Just looking at their demo had convinced me to give it a try and I loved it since. 🥰
Umami provides me with the most important metrics: page views, devices used, and where my visitors are coming from.
I also use Google Search Console to know how their bot sees my website and how users find my website on Google search engine.
Let's see together what I can learn from all these statistics. 😀
Browsers
According to my Umami instance, I got 10'776 visitors for the whole year. Unsurprisingly, the browser most used by them is Google Chrome. The stats seem to correlate with the usage share of web browsers.
Fortunately, Mozilla Firefox follows in the second position. We should stop using Chrome if we don't want to have a monoculture. 🙈
Operating systems
Again, it doesn't surprise me to find that Windows is the operating system most used by my visitors. Especially when you consider how much the majority of companies force their employees to use Windows...
Devices
With these statistics, maybe I should be wondering if my website is fully responsive... 🙊
But since the articles I write should be of more interest to developers, it makes sense that they use desktops more than their mobile. Who wants to look at code on a tiny screen? 🔍
The usage of mobiles and tablets is even scarier on Google Search Console. By looking at this chart, it looks like not many people choose to click on the results of my website. 😮
At least, I know that I've loyal readers like Jason Lessard. 😎
Countries
In the whole year, visitors from 136 countries have come to my website! Most of them are from the countries with the largest English or French speakers: the United States, Germany, France, Canada and even Russia!
Do you think that Vladimir Putin has seen my website? 😅
Oh, and did you know that Excel can build a visual map with the data you provide? With that, it's more clear than ever that my visitors are around the world! 🌎
I wish I can thank all of you who are reading my articles in your native language!😘 So instead, I'll thank you in the languages I know:
Merci à tous!
Thank you all!
¡Gracias a todos!
Referrers
Oh oh, these statistics worry me a little bit! If for some reason Google decides to remove my website from their search results, most people would not be able to find my site! 😣
Let's hope it doesn't happen! 🤞
Pages
Wow, it's crazy that one of my posts, How to Push to a Git Repository from a GitLab CI Pipeline, is responsible for a quarter of my website's traffic!
The most popular posts on my blogs are related to either one of these themes: GitLab, Docker, DevOps and Traefik. Well, I hope my other themes will gain more traction in 2022 because there is a good chance that I won't be able to write as much on GitLab and Traefik this year as I don't use them currently in my new job. 😫
Requests
With Google Search Console, I'm able to see the requests that are leading traffic on my website. 🤫
My post How to Run a Cron as a Non-root User in Docker seems to score well with its corresponding request. 😁
Maybe I should check more these statistics to determine the subjects other developers are looking for that I could answer? 🤔
Conclusion
Well, I don't know for you, but for my usage, I don't need to know the devices used by my visitors. It's interesting to see them, but as I don't plan to change something after seeing the stats, they are not useful to me. 🙃
It is also fun to see where my visitors are actually, but apart from bragging about these statistics, I don't know what to do with it. 😋
And with the two latest statistics, I know that if I want to have more visitors in 2022, I should continue blogging on GitLab and other automating stuff.
And you, what subjects do you want to read more about on my blog? 😬
