Ask HN: How much traffic did your HN frontpage post create for your website?

3 points·harryvederci··4 comments

Curious about what one could expect in terms of traffic increase when hitting the front page.

Maybe you could share some stats, like:

- amount of points your HN post had

- clicks 1 week before the post

- clicks on the day of the post

- clicks 1 week after

- anything else you may find noteworthy.

View on HN

In terms of traffic, my website received about ~24,000 visits in the span of about 3-4 weeks, with the majority of the views (~16,000) occurring in the first week, but the effect continued for quite some time after due to back-linking, social media sharing, and whatnot.

For reference, my site averaged less than 50 visits per month in total before my blog post hit the front page (in April 2021).

Only in the last month as of writing this comment (October 2021) have the numbers trickled down gradually from the hundreds to the tens.

In terms of performance, I have a static site (built with Jekyll, hosted on Netlify, BunnyCDN for media, and proxied through Cloudflare) so the traffic spike didn't affect the site at all. Not even a little bit.

Cool, thanks for your response!

We’ve been front page a handful of times with fairly consistent results. Front page (not first) - 100 to 200 points, 10k day of post, falling to hundreds subsequent days.

The one time we were top post it was 30k visits that day. Thousands the next. Then hundreds the following. Almost 500 points.

It’s a great feeling when it happens. Community comments are super insightful and thought provoking as well.

Really insightful, thanks!

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