Case Study: 1 Year of Wordpress vs. Simplpost

Artist Jes Gamble was one of the first Simplpost users, and her prior use of Wordpress has given us a good opportunity to compare the use of these two platforms.  She used a Wordpress site for her professional online presence throughout 2012.  And then switched to using Simplpost for the entire year of 2013. The time she spent working on her career during these two years did not change significantly, but she did use each site very differently.  Below you will find all the statistics collected from each site during these two years. 

Both sites can currently be viewed online here:
Wordpress site
Simplpost site
 

A year of using Wordpress resulted in an impressive total of 261 images posted to that site.  The Simplpost site resulted in a total of 357 new images posted over the year. That was a 36.78% increase in new image posting. It is interesting to note that there was an average of 10 images per new Wordpress page, and only about 1.8 per Simplpost page.  This is likely correlated to the average number of posts per day/month/year seen below. 
 

The number of videos posted for each year was 1 vs. 4.  There was a 300% increase over Wordpress, but video content was not the main focus of either site.
 

Over the course of 2012 the number of monthly unique visitors to the Wordpress site increased from 109 to 207.  That was a healthy 90% growth rate over that year.  The new Simplpost site started with 35 unique visitors a month and grew to 541 per month.  That was a 1,445% increase in the number unique visitors.
 

One of the most revealing statistics was the comparison of the number of new posts published each month.  With Wordpress the average was two per month.  Simplpost increased the average number of new posts per month to 17.  This 750% increase is likely the driving force behind the increase in traffic overall. Increasing the average frequency of posts from twice a month to almost every other day had a huge impact on the other numbers. 

Here's all the detailed stats collected from each website. 
 

Wordpress:

25 published pages - 2.08/month
261 images - 21.75/month
1 video
Jan 2012 -  109 unique visitors
Jan 2013 -  207 unique visitors
90% increase in monthly traffic over year

Simplpost:

201 published pages - 16.75/month
357 images - 29.75/month
4 videos
Jan 2013 - 35 unique visitors
Jan 2014 - 541 unique visitors
1445% increase in monthly traffic over year

Increasing the average number of new posts per month has a direct correlation with increased traffic.  This is well known strategy in the content marketing community.  This leads to increased social sharing and SEO as there is simply more content to share more often.  Google takes note of how often a site is updated with new content, and factors this into their overall page rank algorithm as well.

Simplpost was designed specifically as a tool to increase the frequency of content posting.  It has a built-in system to make the process more creative and fun. This enables you to reap the rewards of more effective content marketing without thinking about it.  The fact that new posts can be easily added and updated on any page of the site (from any device!) is one of the main factors in this increase of the posting rate.  The entire admin and posting UI is responsive, so you get the same menu options on every device.  And posting new content is much faster due to the streamlined design of all interactions.  There is simply less CMS getting in your way.  Simplpost users are more productive on a platform designed from the ground up with these UX concepts as the primary goal.