What a year 2018 was – although it was the first year in a while without a referendum or General Election, there was still plenty to write about.
Accordingly, it was a busy year for ConservativeHome, and our annual traffic figures show a couple of new records.
During 2018, the site was read by 1,987,800 unique users, who visited a total of 8,909,764 times, and who viewed a total of 15,905,072 pages.
To compare to previous years, that’s a fall from 2017’s 2.2 million unique users and back to the two million mark last seen in 2016. A General Election inevitably brings a wider audience to a political site, so we’re satisfied that in a non-election year we still managed to equal the reach we achieved in the year of the EU referendum.
Pleasingly, those readers who visited the site in 2018 were more engaged with our work than previously: the overall number of visits to the site rose by 9 per cent, while the number of pageviews was up by 13 per cent. On both counts that is a new record, meaning that ConservativeHome’s readers are visiting more often, and reading more when they do visit.
For context, we can draw a direct comparison to 2016, when the number of visitors was almost identical – in 2018 those two million visitors generated 23 per cent more visits, and 35 per cent more pageviews.
There is always more to do, but for a small team that is another creditable performance. Thank you to our colleagues and contributors, who are essential to ConservativeHome remaining the go-to site for all Tory-related news and insight. And thank you to you, our readers, for your continued support.
Here’s to a wonderful 2019.