Month-by-month data since March 2004

The website structure has remained unchanged since 2004, but its size has increased steadily over the years. The following graphs show how three important measures of website usage have varied on a monthly basis. Short term variations result in a 'spiky' appearance, but moving the mouse over the graphs shows the trends more clearly by showing graphs with running averages over 12 months.

Pages

This is the number of html pages and other documents viewed each month. It is the best measure of website activity, even though 'hits' is more frequently quotes because it gives a bigger number!

Hits

This is the number of requests handled by the server each month. It includes a count for every picture on each page and invisible things like JavaScript files. It is not the best measure of website activity, but is the measure which most webmasters quote.

Bandwidth

This is the total number of bytes downloaded each month. It is a good measure of resources needed to run the website. The scale on the left of the graph below is in megabytes.

There are two other statistics, which are not particularly useful, so we don't show graphs for them:

Unique visitors - This is a count of the number of different people accessing the site, as determined by their IP addresses. These are sometimes assigned temporarily each time someone logs on to their server, so a new IP address doesn't always mean a new user.

Number of visits - A single visit covers a series of pages which are looked at without leaving the Pageant website.

Annual totals

The graph below shows 12 month totals for 'pages viewed', 'hits' and 'bandwidth' from 2004 up to 2019. Website usage reached a peak in 2008. There was then a steady fall until 2013 and an increase to another peak in in 2015, before falling once again. Despite a partial recovery in 2017, the decline in usage has continued. We have a theory that this pattern could mirror UK economic conditions. During recessions and other troubled times, fewer people have spare cash for charities, and therefore are less interested in charity websites.

[All the data used was collected with Awstats]

Mobile phones and responsive pages

In 2015 it was becoming obvious that smartphones and other mobile devices would soon be the main way of accessing the internet - overtaking laptops and desktops. At that time, the Pageant website had serious usability issues when viewed on smartphones. Google also began to penalise mobile unfriendly websites with lower rankings.

We decided to start a programme of making the most important pages mobile friendly. Pageant's website is large and many old pages have been retained unchanged as an archive of our activities. Our main pages have all been converted to a responsive format, so that on large screen devices they appear similar to the old pages, but at the same time are accessible on mobile phones without needing horizontal scrolling. This work was completed during 2018, so there have been no dramatic changes since. At present out of pages are in responsive format. Looking at pages viewed of these views were of responsive pages, though they were not necessarily viewed on small screen devices.

Our website is now mobile friendly, but still the great proportion of access is via large screen devices. The table below shows our best estimate of the proportion of 'hits' from mobiles since 2012 and 'pages viewed' over the last few years.

Pageant site access from mobile phones
year	hits	pages
2012	1.7%
2013	6.1%
2014	6.5%
2015	11.4%
2016	23.4%
2017	29.8%	7.7%
2018	29.5%	10.1%
2019	28.1%	10.6%

Hits is a measure of how many files are fetched from our server. It includes images and script files as well as html pages. Pages is a measure of pages viewed. For some reason mobile users download more files to view each page. This could be a function of the way in which mobile browsers work, or might be due to a difference in how mobile users access the internet. We don't have any answers to this puzzle, so if anyone has any useful suggestions, please let us know.

We have no plans for conversion of more old pages. We will continue to look at our main responsive pages to see if there is any way to improve usability for mobile users.