Although I've been blogging in English for quite some years now, today one year ago I switched my website from being local (guidojansen.nl since 2001) to global (gxjansen.com). It feels much more logical to have a .com instead of a .nl when you blog for an international audience right?
Note: in December 2017, the website was moved to gui.do
I had no idea up-front if this would indeed broaden my audience but when I look at my Google Analytics stats I think that the switch was a great success!
Improved statistics
Before this year 39% of my visitors came from outside of The Netherlands, but last year, this increased to 83%! And not only did the ratio change, also traffic in general increased by 470%! It's also great to see a larger percentage of returning visitors, lower bounce rates, more pages are being visited with every visit and doubled time-on-site.
For me enough reasons to believe it was a good choice to switch to a .com domain and to continue adding even more awesome blogposts! :)
Some other stats for those who're interested:
Around 5% of my visitors uses a mobile device (and uses the mobile-optimized version of my website). Most popular browsers are Firefox (48%) and Chrome (28%), the most popular OS is Windows (65%) followed by Mac (21%).
Biggest traffic sources:
The most popular posts for this year:
Recently I've seen some (often absolute) statements going around, generally in the line of "open source commerce platforms are a terrible idea". Now of course different solutions always have different pros and cons.
A hierarchy of evidence (or levels of evidence) is a heuristic used to rank the relative strength of results obtained from scientific research. I've created a version of this chart/pyramid applied to CRO which you can see below. It contains the options we have as optimizers and tools and methods we often use to gather data.