Can the time of publishing articles affect Web traffic? Well, this is a question I have been asked a few times by fellow bloggers who are looking for ways of maximising visitors to their blog or managing their sites more efficiently. Perhaps, one of the best way of answering this question is by taking a look at your traffic stats and monitoring the results for a few days, weeks or months depending on your preference. While there are so many statistic tools out there that can perform this function, I tend to stick with AWStats particularly for this purpose. The image below is a random Website’s screenshot of an AWStats hourly traffic results display, in a one month period.
Click to View
When observing these stat results, it is usually advisable to be patient and wait for a few months before reaching a conclusion. By making simple comparisons between results obtained from different months, you are likely to notice a trend in the amount of hits to your Website at certain periods of the day. This will make it easier to find the peak period or best time to publish articles on your site in order to take advantage of the perceived rush in traffic.
Challenges
Like everything else, you may face some challenges from for example, differences in time zones. This can be compensated for by writing articles or developing content in advance and using a scheduler to publish them. While knowing the right time to post content is not the only way to increase traffic to a site, it can certainly assist in providing better management and improved performance.
Talking Point
Can you suggest other ways to make a Website more effective and improve its performance?
5 Comments
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UK Webmaster forum
September 29, 2010 at 1:16 pm
I think time of post will have little or no effect on the traffic of the blog, but unique and quality content will play a very important role on traffic of a blog.
Alex on Increase RSS
December 10, 2010 at 6:37 am
Yes, you are right.
Once the post is made on websites or blogs then it stays longer.
If you have provided quality in your post then absolutely it would increase your site popularity and your site links as well.
On the other hand, the main thing about blogs, traffic, comments etc. is it lets you keep learning as you get lots of ideas, tips, advice from your commentators as well.
Mary Olson
August 14, 2011 at 2:37 pm
I agree with you Alex, allowing commenting on blogs would give visitors, ideas and we can learn from them a lot.
Henway
September 30, 2010 at 3:41 pm
This tip may not necessarily improve traffic, but it could improve conversions…
The tip is to have seasonal call to action’s. So suppose it’s Christmas, you could have a call to action that says “Christmas Special: Order for 50% off” or something like that.
Gran Canaria
September 30, 2010 at 6:20 pm
Yeah, I agree. Far more important things to improve on a website/blog, than to mess with this data.
Also, when you post an article it will not be indexed immediately, so you might miss your time window. Unless, your site is extremely highly ranked, of course. In that case the bots will come in matter of minutes.