The ‘Follow our journey’ series provides insight into the data behind the scenes of a travel website, so you can decide for yourself whether it’s still a viable endeavour in 2026. In the first instalment, we run the rule over The Travel Tome’s first month-and-a-bit in existence.
The headlines
By the time we launched The Travel Tome on 11 February 2026, the site had been quietly running in private mode for almost two years as we’d let work and other commitments take over (it’s been a busy couple of years!).
Now we’ve been live for a month or so, we’ve decided to have a look back over the viewing figures from the Tome’s first four weeks of life – from 11 February to 11 March 2026.
As you can see from the above graph, we had a modest number of views in this period: 421 from 160 unique visitors to the site. We also get to see your likes, by the way (so please like things, or you’ll hurts our feelings…)!
Our homepage is by far and away our most popular, which is understandable based on what Google is telling us. Currently, the homepage is the only page on the site the search engine has indexed, meaning when you search for TheTravelTome.com on Google, that’s the only page you’ll find. Our wonderful suggestions about the smaller destinations to visit in Southeast Asia or our guide for getting to Anfield Stadium are currently only available on the site itself, and not yet through Google.
It’s proving difficult to change this via the Google search console, where we’ve essentially had to ask the Google overlords to review the other pages on the site to allow them to be indexed. For anyone else with a newly minted website, this is something I’d recommend investigating as it’s not a quick fix – we’re still waiting for Google to ‘re-crawl’ our site so that more of our pages show up!
Bing, on the other hand, has the full site up and running, allowing you to see all of our pages when you search for us. It’s a shame Microsoft’s search engine doesn’t have the same amount of traffic as Google…
Elsewhere, you can see that Mike’s sharing on LinkedIn is doing a lot of heavy lifting, as is our Instagram page, which has started to pump some of our content out. We’re fortunate enough to have been able to utilise a friend’s existing account that already had around 9,000 followers. Yet given this had been dormant for some time, we’re not sure the majority of its followers are even using Instagram anymore!
Where in the world?
This is an incredibly exciting bit of data, allowing us to gauge The Travel Tome’s global reach. Sorry to our British and American pals, but seeing countries like Nepal, Tanzania, and Australia here is amazing! It’s a goal of ours to get eyeballs from (almost) every country in the world on the site – and then hopefully convert these content consumers into content contributors!
With any luck, we’ll have an even more diverse visual of views to show you in the not-too-distant future!
How are people viewing the site?
Clearly, in 2026, the mobile phone is king. This is a statistic that surprised me, but I’m obviously behind the times.
Subscribers
We both subscribed early on when we started creating The Travel Tome (who wouldn’t subscribe to their own site?!). However, since launching, we’ve gained 13 actual subscribers. We’re super grateful to those who’ve subscribed and have already thanked the majority of them personally as they’re our friends and family (you’ve got to start somewhere!), but we’ve also gained a couple of subscribers through Mike’s LinkedIn posts.
If you haven’t subscribed already, just enter your email in the Subscribe bar at the top of the page – it’s that easy and costs nothing!
Other sources of views
We also have a YouTube channel that we mainly use to upload videos from our travels to then embed in our posts. However, we haven’t uploaded much recently. This is something we’ll be paying more attention to in the coming months.
Contributors
Ultimately, our aim is to have people from all around the world contributing to the Tome. We were incredibly lucky to receive our first contribution to the site in the form of Diana Sanders’ Aberteifi Sonata. Hopefully, this will be the first of many. If you want to join Diana in contributing to the Tome, let us know via the Contribute page!
How much have we made from the site?
The million-dollar question (we wish): how much does a website that has a grand total of 160 visitors make in a month? The answer is zilch. Nothing. Nada. Ah well, it’s all uphill from here…
Check back in a couple of months for the three-month ‘Follow our journey’ update, by which point we’ll have – hopefully – been fully indexed by Google!
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