Traffic Report: January 2025 — 7.5k page views

I started 2025 with a new attitude: What’s the best that could happen?

It’s shaping the way I think about a lot of things?? Like, instead of “what if this doesn’t work out”, I’m thinking,

“What if this does work out?”
“How much might my blog grow?”
“How might this post resonate with my audience — and what accessory could I create to make it more impactful for them?” (e.g. checklist, downloadable, infographic)

I am NOT chalking this mindset shift up to mindset work…this is not the result of “mindset work” or learning to be more mindful.

This mindset shift is a result of a self-correcting behavior practice I started doing in 2023 and a decade of trauma healing.

I also established a new boundary: I will not be taking advice from just anyone, especially in regard to my blog or business.

Denise DT calls this “inappropriate advice”, and I’ve realized how easily it applies to other areas of my life. A major reason I “failed” at business a few times was because I listened to other people.

Even when they mean well, inappropriate advice is harmful because it comes from a place of someone else’s bias and not my own.

Inappropriate advice is a total confidence killer.

So…this time, this year, I’m going after what I want. I’m not looking for straight “success” or to prove myself to anyone other than myself.

Do I believe I can do it? Absolutely not. My blog hitting 8k page views this month was possible halfway through, but I’m still struggling to believe it!

Let’s get into the report now.~

Table of contents

Traffic overview

Posts published this month: 11
Page views this month: 7,457
Sessions this month: 6,244

I pushed myself to publish more posts this month, but I didn’t want to burn out so I updated some older posts instead.

The quality goes down the more posts I push myself to complete. I wish it didn’t. I didn’t accept this at first, but it’s true.

Something I do that I’ve never seen anyone else talk about is use what’s already working.

If one of my blog posts is already showing up for certain search queries, but it’s not directly relevant, I either create a new blog post or update the one that’s loosely related.

That gives me plenty of blog post ideas, but alas…I need to pace myself.

As my page views increased, I realized my blog may qualify for Journey by Mediavine (MV) in the next two months. I could earn an income from my blog between 10k sessions and 50k page views, when I was planning to apply for Raptive Rise. 😅

However, I’ve read about people’s experiences with MV, so I don’t know if the move is right for my site…but it might be right for me, considering my situation.

I realized in 2023 that my blog could be a legitimate source of my income, when I was homeless. I wasn’t able to be consistent with blogging then for various reasons…I am now.

Over the last couple of years, I’ve repeatedly thought that my blog may be the only constant, “secure” income I may be able to land as I am.

Traffic sources

Organic search: 5,602 sessions
Direct: 556 sessions
Referral: 88 sessions
Organic social: 44 sessions
Organic video: 4 sessions

I’m wondering if “organic video” traffic is from people clicking through to my site from my YouTube channel profile. 🤷‍♀️

3 month comparison

Comparing pages over the last three months in Google Search Console and sorting them by least to greatest clicks informs you of what posts are losing search traffic.

Autistic Burnout Quiz — lost 600+ clicks
DID alter roles — lost 500+
Autism + being perceived — lost 350+
Alter communication — lost 120+
TS4: Toddler traits — lost 50+
DID protectors — lost 35+
Caretaker alter — lost 30+

I didn’t care about my Minnie Maud or extreme hunger posts losing clicks in search. 🤷‍♀️ Even if I blog about eating disorder recovery, I think those posts are best left to

I updated posts from most clicks lost to least. 💁‍♀️

The sucky part of blogging about neurodiversity and sharing insights into how my mind works is how close these topics are to the your money or your life (YMYL) category.

I want to lean away from YMYL topics because they can be so wishy-washy, hence why I’m focusing more on autism- and family dynamics-related content.

For the alter roles post, I looked at the information every search result above mine included and noted the biggest thing they lacked was making the content easy to digest.

Um, I can do that! Every other result’s information was displayed using large paragraphs, so I updated MY list post to feel faster to read by

using more line breaks
using bulleted lists where I could
drastically shortening the length of my post from 3k words to 1500 words (🥴 I’ll admit it was hard!)
adding additional keywords in ways that felt natural (I noticed other sites found ways to stuff keywords)

After updating, it was losing ~200 less clicks.

Other areas I worked on

Performance

My site has been slower on mobile for years. Switching hosts helped, but I wanted to see if I could still speed it up.

I lazy loaded comments with a simple plugin. There’s a more complex plugin, but I don’t know if I’ll try it.
I installed the LiteSpeed Cache plugin. There are things I could do without the plugin, but this is better than nothing. 💁‍♀️
Images should also lazy load, but they still load fast so I struggle to test that part. 🤷‍♀️
Using the @media rule, I changed mobile users to utilize a system font stack instead of my custom fonts stack.
I disabled the global-inline-styles-css from loading.
Custom CSS through the WP Customizer were moved to my style.css file, which I also consolidated so it no longer has any @import files.
Replacing the Ko-Fi widget plugin and embedded widget with an image increased speed and reduced requests.
Stopped the dashicons.min.css file from being called for unregistered users, because why?? Then noticed my external icons didn’t show up anymore in incognito. 🥴 I copied from the CSS file the code needed for the one icon and added it to the bottom of my theme’s style.css instead.
JetPack’s social sharing feature was traded for Hubbub Lite.

My PageSpeed Insights mobile grade only increased by 10 points (69 to 79)…and I’m fine with that for right now. 🤷‍♀️

Debug Bear was also helpful in figuring out what my requests waterfall looked like.

User experience (UX)

I made two minor accessibility improvements this month.

Ages ago, I used an external links plugin. I installed one again to differentiate between on-site and external links because I link quite a bit. ✨

Styling my table of contents (TOC) to match my theme, both in light and dark mode.

The blog posts that have a TOC perform much better than those without. I know some bloggers manage to grow their blog without a TOC, so I presume it’s a minor search engine optimization (SEO) factor.

However, I’ve noticed Google Search provides easy “jump to” links in search results for posts that have a TOC.

I also like the ability to directly link to a section, so my TOC plugin saves me a few extra steps.

However, in dark mode the TOC links would display in the same #444 grey, making it hard to see.

I styled the TOC links to match links on the rest of my site — whether in dark or light mode.

I doubt this will affect my traffic in a major way, but it will improve people’s experience when they visit my blog. Not every single accessibility improvement needs to benefit SEO.

Sometimes, making something more accessible is about being a kind human.

YouTube

With the impending TikTok ban, I

downloaded all the videos I could from TikTok via SnapTik,
searched Google Photos for the rest and
screen recorded what I couldn’t.

I wanted to upload them to YouTube without overwhelming my 11 subscribers so much they unsubscribed, so I scheduled two shorts a day to post.

This will help with brand awareness/recognition a bit, since my YouTube is @LemonAndLively.

Takeaways

I don’t always learn something myself about blogging, so let’s try “takeaways” — my advice for other bloggers and occasionally things I personally took away from the month.

Posting routinely on YouTube may be better than rarely posting or posting nothing at all. Regardless of what happens with TikTok, YouTube has a huge audience. I doubt I’ll keep up with 2x shorts every single day, but posting routinely is definitely worth it.
Treat every single blog post like it’s the FIRST IMPRESSION someone has of your blog. I’ve been recommending this for 10+ years. It’s the bare minimum standard for my blog posts. It rings even more true in 2025 and beyond.
Prioritize brand awareness when starting a blog/new channel so you’re not having to say, “It’s my blog,” when people on social media talk about it. Minimum brand awareness = “Wait, it was YOUR blog I found earlier?! OMG! SO COOL!”

Correlation doesn’t equal causation

This weird thing happens when other bloggers go through what I experienced: They chalk growth up to something specific they did and think that’s that.

In my case, it would be something about how switching to a better web host almost doubled my traffic — while ignoring everything else I did…the biggest thing I did.

I do believe switching to GreenGeeks helped. Their servers are faster, so my site is faster. Also, my blog didn’t go down after it hit 5k page views!

However, this is also the result of blog posts I wrote and published compounding over time — along with several other minuscule actions over the years.

Imagine you’re building blocks. Each time you add a block, the tower gets taller and stronger. The more blocks you add, the bigger it gets. Every new block makes the tower even more impressive.

All my blogging efforts for Lemon & Lively build on each other. The more posts I write or update, the more they work together to bring people to my blog — thus making it grow bigger and better over time.

I prioritize evergreen content and publish “fluff” content alongside evergreen content, probably 80/20 if not 90/10 evergreen vs. non.

Niche bloggers prioritize evergreen content, in that they seek to publish 100% evergreen pieces. As a lifestyle blogger, I prefer to mix evergreen posts with other types of posts.

I’ve found a decent balance, since most people don’t realize which posts are foundational pieces and which aren’t. As concrete or pillar post opportunities are diverse, I don’t find my 80/20 or 90/10 ratios stifling.

Over the years, I’ve less interest in publishing super personal pieces or a lot of life updates, anyway. Concrete content is akin to autistic infodumping. 💁‍♀️

Blogging goals for February 2025

Okay, so now that you know how the first month of 2025 went for me as a blogger, here’s what I’ll be working on next month.~

Brand awareness

Scheduling YouTube videos out is more sustainable for me than recording, editing and uploading straightaway. Next, I’ll focus on batch scheduling videos to post on Facebook and Instagram.

Creating videos about DID may help raise the association of my blog name with the topic. 🤔 And perhaps the same in regard to autism content.

I’m brainstorming how I can recycle my posts into 5-10-minute videos that link back to the respective posts for people interested in more info.

I need to diversify my blog traffic so I don’t feel so vulnerable. My traffic increased so much in January that organic search traffic was over 90%. 😵💫

Pinterest is the best way I know how to do that. I’ll be targeting posts that may perform best on Pinterest and worry about promoting the other posts later when I have a Pinterest virtual assistant.

Personal growth

All of this feels like a lot, and it was. I treated my blog like it was already a business as opposed to blogging when I felt like it. I chose posts strategically, even when it was harder to write them. 💀

Making sure everything is prim and proper added a level of stress I didn’t know I could have. 😅

However, getting the speed under semi-control now is better than waiting too long for the “later”.

This journey is very much one of working harder and smarter now so that I’m not wishing I had started when I did (in December) several months from now.

Because that has literally been my pattern — wishing I’d started doing all this ish months ago. So this is all kind of new to me. I’ve been in the traffic growth stage before, but stopped because of the host issues.

It’s kind of scary, but I am looking at it as me growing into the kind of person who will be capable of having a high-traffic blog.

I’m trying not to think about over 5k human beings on my site a month. I usually disappear…or dissociate. My biggest priority lately has been staying grounded.

I have the blogger version of stage fright. 💀

Like, I’ve had 18k page views before, with about 17k sessions. I hadn’t yet grown into the type of person who could appreciate it, though, and what that meant.

Growing a blog requires one to grow as a person. Publishing posts takes guts. Dissociating from this reality is possible, but then the thought blooms in my mind that I’m in new territory and don’t completely know how to navigate it.

I’m so used to second-guessing myself that, a few times, I’ve felt like I needed external approval. However, seeking external approval instead of trusting my intuition is a behavior I’m trying to stop doing.

All of this so far is a humbling experience.

Do you have tips on increasing brand awareness as a blogger? Drop them in the comments!

P.S. My blog was accepted into Journey by Mediavine early! February’s traffic report will be posted next month.~

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