February and March Roundup

• Going steady
• Traffic struggles
  • Pausing sponsorships
  • Unavailability
• Feature freeze

I promise I'm going to get into a position to do this every month 🫣

¶Going steady

Ok, March isn't over, but it's a holiday weekend so it's going to be pretty quiet and that means it's unlikely there will be a significant impact on the following details.

• Traffic has been steady, with visitor numbers remaining about the same as last time, but pageviews have taken a bit of hit more on this below
• Despite this, the Laravel Adoption in 2024 blog post got over 2k views on its own
• We're closing in on 3,000 registered users already! Maybe I should do another promotion?
• Lost a GitHub sponsor and a site sponsor, but gained a site sponsor - please welcome 7Span
• 2 Teams subscribed to plans - MRR now around $600 💰
• Got some good suggestions in the suggestion box
• Over 50 messages were sent from Teams to Devs across Feb and Mar - this is the most activity on-site so far!

¶Traffic struggles

As I noted above, pageviews have been down. Around 15k across Feb and Mar vs over 20k in Dec and Jan. I think there are a few reasons for this:

¶Pausing sponsorships

I've had to pause a number of sponsorships across the Laravel ecosystem. While they were bringing really relevant traffic to the site, it wasn't enough traffic compared to other free and paid sources.

¶Unavailability

I was away a lot in February. Unfortunately I also got sick (again!) before we came back so it took until the middle of March before I was really back on my feet.

On top of that, I've started up client work again.

This has meant that I've not actively been promoting the site or writing new blog posts for about a month.

I didn't expect my disappearance to be so long, but I could still have planned for this by writing a few extra blog posts and scheduling them, scheduling some tweets and whatnot.

I find this slightly challenging because I like my posts to be more relevant to what's happening in the moment, which isn't possible when preparing them all in advance... at least not without a very good crystal ball 🔮

I will try to strike a better balance going forwards, but the good news is that I'm back up to fighting fitness and will be back at the blog and more over the next few weeks. Got some exciting content ideas!

¶Feature freeze

The other impact that being so unavailable has had is that I haven't been able to put as much effort into getting various features out.

That's going to change over the next few weeks though for sure! There's a few key ones that are in the works that should all start coming through during April, finally!

So look out for those.

Thanks for your time and support, hope you have a great Easter and return refreshed!