HTTPS is the secure version of HTTP, it makes sure that information sent between your browser to the website you’re viewing is encrypted and can’t be decrypted by any machine or person in between.

Traditionally HTTPS was only used on important sites such as banks or checkout pages in ecommerce websites where your privacy was considered paramount. HTTPS wasn’t broadly used in the early days of the internet as SSL certificates were only available to purchase from a relatively small number of companies, they were expensive and it came with a performance penalty due to the additional work needed for establishing the secure connection and the ongoing encrypt/decrypt process.

In 2010, low single digit percentages of internet traffic were encrypted. By 2015, encrypted traffic was at about 25%. In the following 10 years, the barriers that were holding back adoption have been removed. Thanks to Lets Encrypt, you can get free SSL certificates. Web hosts integrate with Lets Encrypt, automatically issue/re-issue and install the SSL certificates. The original performance penalty has been removed. With HTTP/2 (the second version of the HTTP protocol) which requires HTTPS, websites load dramatically faster. Couple that with a big push from companies like Google, suggesting it is a ranking factor with their algorithm and by 2025 over 90% of all internet traffic is encrypted.

I’m late to the party, but I’m doing my part in switching to HTTPS :P

In keeping with past years statistics, below is a quick summary of what web traffic looked like in 2012.

In 2011 my blog took 108,325 visits and 140,882 pageviews, while in 2012 it took 76,630 visits and 97,964 pageviews. Last year I was happy to see that the number of visits and pageviews were increasing, not to their highest levels when I was regularly blogging about technical topics but it was nice to see regardless.

This year however, something drastic happened in April and after digging into Google Analytics the first date that traffic plummeted was April 24, which was the date Google rolled out a new algorithm named Penguin. The Google Penguin update was designed to combat several different over optimisation tactics that are commonly used in online marketing to drive more visits from Google. Fortunately while I fell victim to the original update, I was given a reprieve in late May when Google made an update to their algorithm – though traffic never returned to the exact same levels before.

What is surprising to me is that I was penalised at all by the algorithm. I haven’t performed any search engine optimisation on my blog, aside from configuring a few common WordPress plugins that everyone uses and except for my commenting legitimately on interesting blogs online – any links to my website are 100% organic.

It comes as no surprise that Google still dominate the traffic to this blog, like they do to most websites around the world. Following on from last year, Google organic search continued to contribute ~78% of the traffic to the entire website. Bing & Yahoo! (which uses Bing from a search engine technology stand point) continue to provide a dribble of traffic, contributing just over 3% compared to 3.5% from last year.

The most popular posts for the year were nearly identical to last year, however a technical post about an Oracle database error lost out in favour of a post describing how to get an old HP printer to work in Windows 7:

1. Disable Options In A Select Dropdown Element
2. Select Option Disabled & The JavaScript Solution
3. Oracle RETURNING Clause
4. Like Father, Like Daughter
5. Windows 7 HP Laserjet Drivers Support

Of course when you ignore posts from prior years and only count articles written in 2012, it changes a lot:

1. Jabbawockeez Jupiters Theatre Gold Coast
2. Infolinks In-Text Advertising Review
3. Shh, The Dinosaur Is Asleep
4. Hugo, 4 Years Old
5. Evie, 2 Years Old

I haven’t bothered to keep a close eye on the health of my blog this year and I’ve suffered as a result. Had I have been keeping an eye on things, I’d have noticed the significant decline in traffic toward the end of April and could have started to take action to rectify those issues. Of course, there is nothing stopping me doing it now either – so maybe I’ll spend a little time on some analysis to see what Google might be complaining about.

Onward & upward for 2013!

In keeping with my annual review of things and following on from my 2010 website traffic statistics, below is a quick summary of what happened during 2011.

Throughout 2010 my blog took 97,509 visits and 132,068 pageviews and for the year of 2011 108,325 visits and 140,882 pageviews. It is nice to see that my sites visitation has grown over the year, however it is a long way from the hay days of 145,000 visits when I was writing technical style posts and a mixing it with pop culture items like Australian Idol.

Breaking down the traffic sources for the year, shows a 4% increase in search engine traffic as a percentage of the whole site, up from 74% to 78%. Within the search engine space, Google continues to completely dominate, increasing by 2% to just under 96%. Despite every effort made by Microsoft, such as buying the search engine business from Yahoo! in an attempt to gain market share – it isn’t reflected in the traffic for my blog and collectively Bing & Yahoo! represent about 3.5% of my search referrals.

The most popular posts for the year were nearly identical to the past years, with the a cute Ragdoll cat photo edging its way into the list:

1. Disable Options In A Select Dropdown Element
2. Select Option Disabled & The JavaScript Solution
3. Oracle RETURNING Clause
4. Like Father, Like Daughter
5. ORA-04030: out of process memory when trying to allocate <x> bytes

Ignoring posts I’d written in a previous years and isolating only 2011, a different picture arises:

• How To Kill Paper Wasps
• Windows 7 HP Laserjet Driver Support
• Best Men’s Razor
• Evie’s 1st Birthday Ladybug Themed Party
• Canon 600D Digital Camera

Bring on 2012, with a bit of luck the landscape will have changed by then again.

Every once in a while, I go through this site and perform some general housekeeping and website maintenance work. The last time I performed a big chunk of maintenance was back in 2008 when I went through and consolidated about 25 categories and subsequently re-categorised a huge number of posts.

The time has come again, this time it is to do with the how I format images within posts. Back in the earlier days of this site, I used a custom image formatting setup which looked quite cool but is less practical. With the more recent versions of WordPress, I just want to be able to use the WYSIWYG editor and focus more on writing and less on the formatting issues.

I’ve got about 80 or so old posts to go through and do a little tidy up on, so I’m thinking I might have it done in dribs & drabs by the end of the week.