2021 review in numbers

First day of a new year! Let’s have a look at some numbers of this silly little website from 2021.

Traffic

During 2021 we’ve had 10.9K visitors with a total of 40.3K page views! No idea what that means compared to other sites, but this is a very niche site so the numbers look good to me.

Apparently a lot of people have some form of interest in the CSS of their website. That’s a sign of hope for me. Project Wallace is a great educational tool, whether you’re a seasoned developer or a new kid on the block. And having lots of folks around here means that many people are getting better at understanding the CSS they wrote.

Important referrers

Pretty much all traffic on this website comes from a handful of blog posts on the internet. Most of these posts are either on Smashing Magazine or CSS Tricks. Some big spikes in traffic this year because of some posts gaining traction or a popular newsletter that was just sent. Let’s list the top ones:

• Smashing Magazine (3.6K views):
  • CSS Auditing Tools by Iris Lješnjanin: 2.4K views
  • Refactoring CSS: Introduction by Adrian Bece: 915 views
• CSS Tricks (2.3K views):
  • Tools for Auditing CSS by Silvestar Bistrović: 1.2K views
  • Design v18 by Chris Coyier: 530 views
  • Several more newsletter pages and older blog posts that gained less traction.
• Google: 2K views
• Twitter: 1.2K views
• GitHub: 844 views
• LinkedIn: 734 views
• A shoutout to the several visitors that keep coming back from specific Jira URL’s. I see you and I applaud the people who thought it would be useful to create a ticket for themselves or someone else to have a look at Project Wallace.

I am so grateful for any of these authors for mentioning this website with positive remarks. It’s so inspiring to see other people being enthusiastic about this space. Especially Chris Coyier holds a special place for me because he let me write a piece on CSS Tricks about monitoring CSS quality. Thanks Chris, you’re such an amazing person!

Activity

Looking at the raw database numbers for projectwallace.com, combined with data from Fathom Analytics:

• 3.2K analyze CSS via URL. That means entering a URL, a headless browser spins up in a serverless function, it scrapes the CSS, and Wallace analyzes that CSS online. In just a couple of seconds.
• 503 analyze CSS via direct input. Copy your CSS, paste it in the <textarea> on projectwallace.com/analyze-css, hit the button. 503 times. That’s a lot.
• 264 times Get CSS. Sometimes you just need the CSS for a URL. This does just that. Less popular than analyzing CSS, but apparently still useful.
• 340 users created. That’s the amount of people whow thought it might be useful to keep track of their CSS over time, instead of only having a one-time look only. Amazing number, if you ask me.
• 23 users deleted their account. And deleted means deleted forever. I can only keep count of the amount of deletions, because I don’t keep any record of anyone cancelling their account.
• 349 projects created. Slightly more than the amount of people signing up.
• 59 projects deleted. Didn’t expect that many, but I think folks on the free plan need new projects sometimes, so they need to delete their existing one. Maybe you should consider upgrading so you can have more projects?
• 3621 imports created. 2910 via a webhook, 244 via pasting CSS in a <textarea>, 467 via entering a URL.
• 184 login failures. Apparently, logging in is hard sometimes. No worries, we’re all struggling from time to time.

Conclusion

Frankly, it baffles me that so many people take an interest in breaking down their CSS and it’s really motivating to keep this project running.

Bart