Patheos leads to over 20% bump in traffic

I’m usually quiet about the traffic to this blog, and I still don’t feel comfortable sharing the actual figures with you. What I will say though, is that when I considered joining Patheos my decision wasn’t made on potential blog traffic. It still amazes me that anybody finds reading this site helpful, and I am aware that there are plenty of bigger fish as well, whose traffic makes this blog’s look tiny.  In fact when I made my decision to move, I did wonder if I would lose some readers. I wondered if some Reformed folks might not fully agree with my reasons. I decided to make the jump, convinced it was the right thing for me to do, and willing to take a “hit” in traffic if necessary.

But as it happens, just one person contacted me to say that thanks to the move they would no longer read the blog, and it appears from traffic logs that more than 1,000 new readers have arrived (although these figures are never 100% accurate).  If you are a new reader, or an old one, this post would be a great one to make yourself known in the comment section.  I’d love to know who has been reading this blog for the longest, though I expect most of you won’t remember how long you have been reading!

Anyway, I calculated the average page views over the first nine months of this year.  Midway through October I made the move to Patheos, and over the course of the whole month my pageview traffic was up by 27%. This was not just a temporary blip and the traffic for November remains up 20% on the first nine months of the year!

So thanks to all the folks at Patheos who have made this transition possible, I know it’s not come at an easy time for them, and there are a couple of glitches we still need to fix, but they have been great! I am really looking forward to those tweaks being solved, so that for the first time in my blogging career I can stop worrying about the design, and the technical bits and just get on with blogging!

So over to you: If you are a regular reader, whether you have commented here before or not, I invite you to let me know who you are, where are you from, and how long you estimate you have been reading the blog for!  Welcome one and all, I am so glad that this blog is now feeling more like a community now that comments are fully enabled over here.  If you are on Twitter feel free to Tweet me instead if that is easier for you, and if I don’t follow you already I will follow anyone who @’s me over the next couple of days!