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Gaining Traffic on Neocities
You’ve spent hours making a Neocities site, and now it’s online. Weeks have passed, and it doesn’t seem to be getting much traction. You do have a few followers at least, but you want more. What’s the point of making a website if barely anyone views it?
Usually your regular Neocities activity of following and viewing other sites should garner you some followers. Neocities’ social features make it much easier for a website to get visits. On most other platforms it’s a lot more difficult unless you spend time advertising and thinking about SEO and all that complicated rubbish.
This site might not be the best example of a popular Neocities page, but I can at least give you some tips that can assist you on your path towards Neocities superstardom. It’s really quite similar to gaining social media followers. Followers and fame aren’t everything in this world, however if you want more people to see your site, you’ve got to put in a little bit of effort.
Misty’s Cyber Cafe doesn’t have that many Neocities followers, because I don’t spend that much time interacting with other users’ sites. Yes, I do spend time viewing other pages and occasionally writing in guestbooks, but rarely do I follow other accounts. The key to Neocities popularity (in my opinion) is interaction. This is the same with most other social sites, although it plays a particularly important role here. My previous site was more popular because I followed a lot of people who followed me back, and wrote in a lot of guestbooks. Also, it had been online for a lot longer than this site. Remember, it takes time to get views. A lot of the most popular sites on Neocities have been around for at least a few years.
Following other sites is especially important to get your site’s name around, because of the social feed. It used to be the case that when someone followed a site, everyone would be notified this on their Neocities feed. This has been removed, but still, whenever someone clicks on another site’s profile, they will see a list of new followers of that account. This is true as of the time of writing in June 2023. So if someone’s browsing and clicks on someone’s account, they’ll see a list of new followers, and if you followed that account, your site’s name will be up there! It spreads your name around and may cause curious browsers to click on your profile and view your site.
Guestbooks are less effective, because not many people use them or even view them. Writing a nice message can still also get your site around, and maybe cause you to find Neocities friends.
Webrings are also another way of getting your site advertised, although this is probably less effective in larger webrings where there are too many members. I don’t find webrings that good at making friendships with other users. Once you’ve joined, that’s usually it. You don’t often communicate with your fellow members apart from that. Maybe it’s different for other people, but for me I don’t find them that interesting.
88x31 buttons are a great way of gaining traffic. (See this page for more…) Just make sure your button sticks out amongst the crowd! There have been no studies on how many users will actually click on these buttons, and there probably never will be. But I can at least testify that I will click on an 88x31 button if they look interesting enough.
Getting followers is fine and all, but some of them may only look at your site once and then never come back. You want people to read your content, right? That’s why you’ve got to update often. This can be difficult if you don’t have the time, but even changing one word on your homepage can help. That’s because every single update you make is broadcasted to all your followers, encouraging them to visit your site and see what’s new. I notice that my site views increase on days that I make an update, however minor it is.
You’ve also got to make a site that keeps people wanting more, content that encourages people to come back. There are certain things that attract users on Neocities. I will say that it’s best just to be original and not follow trends, but it’s OK to take a bit of inspiration from other successful sites. I’ll just say that a boring site with just two pages and barely any description apart from “I was fed up with social media so I felt like learning HTML XD XD” isn’t that attractive. I would recommend that you at least have a few pages made before you go live. Yes, this’ll take time and delay your site’s upload, but it’s worth it.
A final tip that I’ll give is to make a graphics page. Everyone likes free stuff.
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