The Brick Fan 2018 Recap

It’s another year in the books and we are now finally able to take a look at the 2018 website traffic and changes on The Brick Fan. You may or may not have noticed, we made some major changes to the site during the summer and fall. We changed hosting companies which resulted in better stability and we also changed the website theme. It may not look that much different from the one we have when we first started the site back in 2012 but it is much smoother and has additional functionality.

As a result as far as numbers are concerned, we ended 2018 with 14,847,830 pages views and that is a whopping 63% increase in traffic from 2017. Everything across the board increased which you can see below.

In June, we spiked in traffic probably due to some behind-the-scenes things I was working on and in September, we rolled out the new layout. Our highest traffic day was on November 22 with 82,568 views. That was the day that images of the January 2019 sets started coming out.

Some other random high traffic days include:

– September 27: LEGO FORMA Theme Officially Announced

– October 10: LEGO Overwatch Omnic Bastion (75987) Revealed

– October 22: LEGO Overwatch Official Images Found at Target

Finally, we finished with 886 posts for the year with 4,818 comments on those posts. Both counts are slightly down from 2017 but considering I was basically working three jobs at one period of time last year, that’s not too bad.

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For social media counts, we’re just slowly growing on the three main social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Again, I’m still not sure why they’re not growing as I expected them to since I’m active on all of them. Maybe I’ll try something different this year. For Facebook, we ended 2018 with 14,206 likes (9% increase) and Twitter finished at 8,017 (9% increase) while Instagram has 13,143 followers (19% increase).

We also launched our own subreddit which so far has 315 readers subscribed to it. Feel free to add it to your subreddits list.

Finally I’ve given up on Google+ as it will be ending in August. Thank you to everyone who followed on it but it couldn’t compete with the bigger sites.

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Comparing The Brick Fan to other sites, Alexa ranks the site at 88,277 globally and 33,165 in the United States. Both ranks went up from 2017.

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2018 was filled with surprises on the site. The most obvious one was the traffic spike for the second half of the year which was the result of the behind-the-scenes work I did during the summer. I decided to make some pretty major changes to the site without much downtime so I started working on them right before SDCC which carried all the way until September when I launched the new layout which included the mobile-friendly version. This conversion finished up in October when I changed hosting companies.

In addition, we launched a shop on Teespring and some of you have already purchased some shirts on it. I hope to add more items to the shop but it’s not a big priority at this time.

I don’t know what to expect in 2019 but I’ll keep doing the same things I’ve been doing which is letting readers know the latest LEGO news without the leaks as well as reviewing sets throughout the year. I’m still mostly doing this as a one-man show but I’ve had my brother help me out here and there. Now that Toys R Us/Babies R Us has closed, I’ve had a more consistent schedule between my new job and on The Brick Fan.

We’re not the biggest LEGO fan site out there but thank you again to everyone who takes time to read and support the site everyday. Let me know if there are things you would like to see differently or more of this year. Our contact form is always open and there are many other ways to contact me on social media.

Happy new year!