September 2009 – 2010 traffic comparison.

September is always the busy time on campus so one thing that is cool to do is look back to last years traffic and see how things are fairing, are things going up or down are things scaling etc. Well things are still going up, way up which is very cool. No longer brochure traffic! WordPress is more popular than ever on this campus.

The WordPress CMS service which has been growing rapidly and has seen a huge spike in traffic thanks to some 50+ campus sites coming on board (and one very popular site http://elearning.ubc.ca). Last year during the month of September the service had (79,821) page views fast forward a year and the service averaged (2,009,301) page views 25x increase!

WordPress CMS Service page views Sept 2009 – 2010

UBC Blogs which has moved out of the “pilot” mode is also increasing not as rapidly as the CMS service which is kind of a surprise we though it would be the opposite… In September 2009 UBC Blogs saw (158,654) page views in September 2010 (434,203) more than double.

UBC Blogs page views September 2009 – 2010

Even wiki.ubc.ca has seen a double in traffic as well. Thanks to quite a few courses taking a stab at developing their course in the wide open wiki.

Exciting times.

4 thoughts on “September 2009 – 2010 traffic comparison.”

Congratulations on launch and ramp-up!

Scott McMillan on October 1, 2010 at 1:22 pm said:

Thanks for the traffic spike 60% of the traffic increase on the WordPress CMS is from elearning.ubc.ca

2 million page vies in a month on elearning.ubc.ca? Wow, how did you prepare for that kind of traffic? Cause UMW is moving its entire site to WordPress, and we may have to consult with you about how you are ramping up the CMS portion of your site, cause while blogs are still the backbone of what we do, they are quickly becoming sites, and for many that allows for a more “professional” influx of requests and traffic, and we are feeling it big time.

Congratulations to all of you, this is very rad.

Hey Jim,

About 60% of that 2 million to elearning.ubc.ca the rest was distributed across 50+ other sites with mapped domains. A couple of those taking more than most. To prepare we did pretty basic stuff caching at a few levels, db server, eliminate all plugins that are not needed etc. We are fortunate to have really good VM infrastructure thanks to UBC IT so we can scale up fairly quickly (add disk, memory, CPU) could not imagine doing this the old way now…

I would recommend keeping it separate from the campus blogging platform. The CMS will probably see more traffic and some of the sites like elearning can basically never go down (access to the campus LMS). Where as blogs you can be a little more experimental trying out BuddyPress etc. We flipped flopped on this at first would it be easier to run one system or two. I am very happy with our decision to separate now even though it means more work.

William Ono on October 1, 2010 at 12:50 pm said:

Congratulations on launch and ramp-up!
- Scott McMillan on October 1, 2010 at 1:22 pm said:
  
  Thanks for the traffic spike 60% of the traffic increase on the WordPress CMS is from elearning.ubc.ca
Jim on October 3, 2010 at 12:09 am said:

2 million page vies in a month on elearning.ubc.ca? Wow, how did you prepare for that kind of traffic? Cause UMW is moving its entire site to WordPress, and we may have to consult with you about how you are ramping up the CMS portion of your site, cause while blogs are still the backbone of what we do, they are quickly becoming sites, and for many that allows for a more “professional” influx of requests and traffic, and we are feeling it big time.

Congratulations to all of you, this is very rad.
Scott on October 3, 2010 at 11:04 am said:

Hey Jim,

About 60% of that 2 million to elearning.ubc.ca the rest was distributed across 50+ other sites with mapped domains. A couple of those taking more than most. To prepare we did pretty basic stuff caching at a few levels, db server, eliminate all plugins that are not needed etc. We are fortunate to have really good VM infrastructure thanks to UBC IT so we can scale up fairly quickly (add disk, memory, CPU) could not imagine doing this the old way now…

I would recommend keeping it separate from the campus blogging platform. The CMS will probably see more traffic and some of the sites like elearning can basically never go down (access to the campus LMS). Where as blogs you can be a little more experimental trying out BuddyPress etc. We flipped flopped on this at first would it be easier to run one system or two. I am very happy with our decision to separate now even though it means more work.