Traffic across the network slipped this week. The 66 sites (one more than last week) logged 15.54k visits and 16.73k page views between September 6 and 12, down 17.69% and 16.14%. Median page load time moved the right way, improving 8.71% to 2,862ms.
The headline drop hides where the loss happened, though. Working back from the percentages, the network did about 18.9k visits the week before, and the ten sites on this week’s list accounted for roughly 7.2k of those. This week they did 7.99k. That’s a gain of around 11%, and it leaves them carrying just over half of all network traffic. So the other 56 sites fell from about 11.7k visits to 7.55k. A third gone. Some of it is sites that sat in last week’s top 10 and slid out, and since the report doesn’t name them, the long tail is where the real question sits.
technologies.org held first place at 2.41k visits (-1.23%) while page views ticked up 1.19% to 2.55k and load time improved 11.29% to 2,272ms. Its Core Web Vitals are the best in the report. LCP at the 75th percentile fell 23.96% to 2,056ms, CLS dropped 99.4% to 0.01 (whatever was pushing the layout around last week has been fixed), and INP sits at 24ms, all inside Google’s “good” range. The catch is who’s visiting. About 1.42k of the roughly 2.39k visits with browser data came from Unknown clients, around 59%. Unknown usually means something that doesn’t identify itself, which in practice is mostly crawlers and scripts. In early August that share was a little over a third. The site is still first. Its human audience is just closer to 1k a week than 2.4k.
The standout jump belonged to technologyconference.com, which doubled to 1.17k visits (+105.26%) and 1.47k page views (+113.04%). At 1.26 pages per visit, readers there went deeper than on any other top site. The browser mix looks human: Chrome 480, Edge 290, Mobile Safari 190, with no Unknown in the top three. Edge taking 290 of those 960 visits is well above what a general web audience looks like, and it fits people on work machines, who are the ones planning conference travel. Vitals improved sharply too, with LCP down 51.65% to 1,468ms, CLS down 94.1% to 0.06 and INP at 32ms. Full page load is still slow at 3,645ms (-13.79%). With LCP that fast, the content shows up quickly and something keeps loading behind it, most likely scripts or embeds. Readers barely notice. Worth trimming anyway.
It wasn’t alone. eventcalendar.net rose 114.81% to 580 visits, with page views matching visits one for one. Two event sites doubling in the same week is hard to read as coincidence. September is when the autumn conference calendar fills up and people start booking, and referrer data would show whether this is search demand or a shared source sending traffic to both.
analysis.org went the other way, losing a quarter of its traffic to finish at 820 visits (-25.45%) and 840 page views (-25%). Load time crept up 2.12% to 3,655ms, the slowest of the top ten by a hair. LCP improved 28.26% to 2,640ms, still just over the 2.5 second line, and CLS fell 78.7% to 0.21. That’s a big fix. It’s also more than double the 0.1 target, which makes analysis.org the only top site with layout shift in the “needs improvement” band. Bots are heaviest here as well, with 570 of 800 browser-identified visits coming from Unknown clients, about 71%. The longer trend is kinder than this week looks. Median load time was over 13 seconds in June and 5.3 seconds in early August. It’s 3.7 now.
pho.tography.org climbed 75% to 770 visits, with page views up 79.55% to 790, a strong week for a photography site. It also reported no load time, no browser data and no Core Web Vitals, all of which it had in August. Visits are still being counted. That pattern usually means the browser-side analytics beacon stopped loading, often after a theme or template change, while edge counting carries on. It’s an easy thing to check in the page source.
Further down, osint.org dipped 12.9% to 540 visits, with page views falling harder at 22.22% to 630. marketanalysis.com was flat on 530 visits while its page views rose 7.02% to 610. cybersecuritymarket.com grew 9.3% to 470 visits and 490 page views. opinion.org had a rough week, down 26% to 370 at exactly one page per visit, and travelmktg.com rounded out the list at 330, up 10%. None of these report load time or vitals. Count eventcalendar.net and pho.tography.org as well and seven of the top ten sites have no real-user performance data at all.
The event sites are the story to follow. If technologyconference.com and eventcalendar.net hold these numbers next week, it’s seasonal demand and worth publishing into. The other open question is the 56 sites outside the list, where most of this week’s lost traffic went.
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