We’re officially one month in 🎉
I celebrated my first visitor… it was me!
This first month wasn’t about traffic or reach. It was about getting the foundation right, seeing what worked, fixing what didn’t, and getting comfortable with showing up online again. This is the phase for building a baseline, both technically and mentally.
What I Said I’d Track
In the very first post, So why create a personal website in 2025?, I said I’d treat this like a product and be transparent with the data. So here’s the first snapshot of how things are shaping up.
Metric | Month 1 Baseline | Notes |
|---|---|---|
Visitors | 55 | Organic baseline before promotion |
Sessions | 94 | Avg 4 min 45 sec per session |
Bounce rate | 46 % | Healthy for an early-stage site |
Channels | 89 % Direct · 9 % Referral · 2 % Search | As expected pre-LinkedIn |
Device split | 84 % Desktop · 16 % Mobile | Skews professional |
Top countries | 🇺🇸 US (36) · 🇦🇺 AU (15) | Early reach beyond home base |
Indexed pages | ~3 avg over 28 days | Crawlers ramping up steadily |
Crawl errors | 1 total | Very healthy baseline |
Outbound clicks | 1 (LinkedIn) | Next step: more engagement |
LinkedIn followers | 397 | Slight bump from offline events |
X followers | 1 924 | Flat, which makes sense since I haven’t posted |
Small numbers, sure, but meaningful ones.
Session times are strong, bounce rates are reasonable, and search engines are starting to trust the site.
What the Data Tells Me
The biggest learning this month is patience.
Search engines take time to crawl a new domain. The root page indexed first, but deeper pages lagged behind. It took nearly three weeks until a handful of pages were visible. Updates to the homepage title and description took close to four weeks to appear in search.
At first that delay was frustrating. Then it became a reminder: this project isn’t about instant reach. It’s about building equity in my own space, one crawl, one post, one tweak at a time.
Technical Learnings
This month had a few technical adventures (and minor facepalms):
- Redirects: Discovered that my early /writing page was still live in Prismic, and it was indexed. It didn’t break anything, but it bothered me. I learned how to set up proper 301 redirects in Next.js.
- Favicons: I built dynamic light and dark favicons with SVG metadata. Browsers loved them. Search engines didn’t. Looks like I’ll need a static favicon file as well.
- Indexing delays: Homepage metadata (title and description) took almost four weeks to update in Google. Unexpected, but part of life with a new domain.
- Analytics: I enabled Vercel Speed Insights and Vercel Analytics and started configuring PostHog for deeper engagement tracking. (Still early days there.)
Nothing too glamorous here, but it's built confidence that my setup is workable.
And after realising most of the early visitors were me, I stopped obsessing over the technical details and shifted my attention back to the craft.
This month reinforced why I built the site in the first place. Not for reach, but for rhythm. To get back into the habit of making things public, learning in the open, and keeping a record that feels like mine.
What's Next
The next month will be about substance.
I’ll be:
- Building out my Resume and Case Studies sections
- Configuring PostHog properly for event tracking
- Experimenting with Medium and Substack to cross-publish a few pieces from this blog
- Refining metadata, schema, and accessibility details behind the scenes
Building this site feels a bit like tending a small digital garden.
Here’s to Month 2 🍻