Thank You (2025 Edition)

If I had to whittle down my favorite thing about CSS-Tricks to one thing - and like Tom Petty hits, there’s a lot of ’em - it’s that we take moments like this to hit Pause and simply write like humans. We’re a super technical site that gets into super technical web dev jargon and yet we’re just a set of people trying to learn together with other people and be better at what we do, whether that’s design, development, accessibility, performance, or any specialty flavor from the wide array of front-end responsibilities . This is my tenth year here at CSS-Tricks. I remember when CSS-Tricks turned 10 . It felt really old (in the best possible way) back then. So imagine how I feel about my age today. What I’m ultimately trying to say is Thank You . Because of real people like you and the small team of folks who contribute here, I get to make this my day job. It’s the best job I’ve had in my life and it’s only possible because you keep showing up each day to read, learn, share, and discuss all-things-front-end (and a little CSS, of course) with us. Thank you, thank you ... thank you ! Allow me a chance to share some highlights from 2025 - a year with a bunch of milestones and (let’s say) interesting twists. Overall Site Traffic Jumping straight to it: there were 20 million unique views in 2025. This is a huge drop-off from last year’s 26 million... and you can literally see the cliff in July when Google added AI summaries to the top of search results . So, yeah, we’re down an alarming 23% for the year, but the real month-over-month impact is more like 30%. Ouch. It hurts - and I’m always quick to blame myself - but is also consistent with other sites I work with and what I’ve been hearing from other publishers in this space as we’ve compared battle notes. I hate saying “it is what it is” but we really are in the midst of a new reality in digital publishing. I’m still trying to wrap my head around it because, obviously, eyeballs pay the bills around here and we’re going to have to adapt. There’s still plenty of reasons to make websites today. Making them sustainable, though? That’s getting harder, even if new CSS features are making the development way more fun. Which brings me full circle to the start of this post: Thank you for showing up. It means the world to us and to me personally. The first and best way you can support CSS-Tricks is to continue showing up. Publishing By The Numbers Looking at a little history of how many articles we’ve published by year: 2020: 1,183 articles 2021: 890 articles (site acquired by DigitalOcean) 2022: 390 articles 2023: 0 articles (site paused) 2024: 153 articles (site resumed in late June) This year? We’re looking at 255 articles . Considering there are 261...

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