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When The Verge launched its redesigned website last September, editor-in-chief Nilay Patel admitted that the effort was motivated, in part, by a desire to capture readership from Twitter users fleeing the platform.
One year later, the Twitter prediction has proven prescient, and thanks to new site features and ad products, people are coming back to The Verge more often.
From January to September, The Verge saw its readership increase 15%, according to Patel. In the same timeframe, its loyal user base, which it defines as a reader who visits the site at least five times per month, increased 62%. (Twitter, now X, has lost 13% of its daily active users since Elon Musk bought the platform in October 2022, per Apptopia).
“Our total user base is growing, but specifically, the user base is shifting to loyal readers,” said Helen Havlak, the publisher of The Verge. “So, the site is doing a great job of converting fly-by readers into loyal readers.”
Despite these increases, in the months following the September 2022 redesign, The Verge saw year-over-year traffic decrease every month except for June 2023, according to Comscore. From September 2021 to August 2022, the publisher averaged 17.3 million visitors per month, per Comscore. From September 2022, when the redesign occurred, to August 2023, the site averaged 11 million monthly visitors.
The technology publisher is not alone in this drop-off; website traffic has been down across the industry, the result of fewer social and search referrals, among other factors. And even the most meticulous redesigns can result in short-term declines in traffic of between 10% and 15%, according to web design consultant Deborah Carver, founder of The Content Technologist.
Loyalty over fly-by scale
According to Havlak, the drop in overall traffic—or algorithmic audiences—is a less meaningful metric than loyal users. She also expects total traffic in Q4 to outpace total traffic from the same time period last year.
Some, like The Verge, will have an easier time focusing on loyalty over a fly-by scale. Its homepage is consistently the highest-trafficked single page across the entire Vox Media portfolio, according to Patel, and its strong brand identity and 11-year lifespan have helped it cultivate a devoted audience.
“We have to make something that inspires people to pay us directly,” Patel said. “We have gotten drunk on cheap algorithmic traffic for too long, and all of those pipes are about to get flooded by bargain-bin content.”
Stickier site features boost loyalty
The Verge redesigned its website to resemble Twitter because social platforms have historically done a better job than publishers in building products that people come back to, said Patel.