Woke up to a massive “god candle” appearing in my Umami instance for Plant🌱Smart. I had to do a triple-take as I immediately wrote it off as Google finally re-indexing the site after almost 2 years of nothing. Then, I took a much closer look and noticed 99% of the traffic was coming from email clients. Which, to be frank, I found quite odd. Why email clients? As it turns out, The Morning Brew — a popular news… newsletter in the States — mentioned my little project in that morning’s issue. Almost 10k visits to the site when the most that could be expected was, maybe, 20 per day if I was lucky. After all, I haven’t really done much in the way of advertising it. The big spike has obviously fizzled out quite a bit, but as a result, the site has been linked to and mentioned in several other places. This can only be good for the site’s rankings in Google’s index, so no complaints coming from me!

I’m obviously a little bummed out the traffic has steadied out as much as it has, but this is a small purpose-built utility site. I’m not going to get 1,000’s of visitors per day here as a normal occurrence. Just stoked that people find it interesting!