Over the last few years, my nearly 18-year-old travel blog has been through hard times. After hitting a peak of about 100,000 pageviews per month in 2019, between COVID and algorithm updates, we saw our traffic dwindle to as low as 4,712 pageviews per month in May 2025- a traffic figure we hadn't seen in nearly 15 years.
To call that depressing would be an understatement.
But in late 2025, I realized that I had nothing left to lose (literally), and decided to treat my travel blog as a test subject for playing around with new update ideas and, over time, we started seeing some encouraging signs!
By November, we had traffic up to over 10,000 pageviews per month for the first time in a year-and-a-half, and by May 2026, just one year later, we were on track to hit 22,000 pageviews per month- a figure we hadn't seen in over two years and just shy of our goal of 25,000 to apply for Raptive.
So in this one, we wanted to share a few of the things we've tested that appear to be working for us right now, and then bring it all together for an analysis of why it may be all of these working together just as much as any individual change.