The purpose of this post is to answer the question, what day is the best day to post to your blog for optimal traffic.

Best day to post to your blog

I have a number of blogs (all WordPress of course) and these are my observations about what day of the week is optimal to post for traffic.

I think every person will have different experiences with traffic and time, this depends on where you are and who your target readers are. For example, I live in Krakow, Poland but most of my readers are in the USA.  Therefore, I have to factor in not only the time delay, but also different work habits and holidays. Further the topics of your posts also have an impact.  Of course business does better during the business week and personal purchases for example on Sunday evening.

That being said I think there are some basic rules that I have observed about when is the best time to post to my WordPress blog.

Ranking of the days

These are the best days to post to your blog for optimal traffic in descending order.

  • Thursday – this is the best day to post to your blog for a one day impact.  Many people are tired of working and just surfing the web at work. Thursday tends to me one of my highest traffic days.
  • Sunday – early evening is a very good day to write a blog post for personal items or even e-bay type sales. most people are at home with nothing to do waiting for their weekend to end, especially Sunday late in the afternoon. Most people are pretty depressed. I generally do not like to work on Sunday as it is against my beliefs, but often I find myself posting any way. In fact, it is Sunday morning before everyone is up and I am writing on my blog now.  I guess I justify Sunday blogging as a mix of fun and work so I classify it as a loophole.   Anyway, any topic connected to buying and selling personal items or self improvement does well, including blogging.
  • Monday- This day has the impact that work web surfers have the whole week to pass it one and share something interesting.  Especially on Monday morning when people are getting adjusted to the shock of the work week. At the start of the web, I often surfed at work, then in the last few years I had a rule no web or personal e-mail at all at work.  I tried to work and get home as soon as possible. But I think most jobs today are so boring that most people do a reasonable amount of personal e-mail and surfing.
  • Tuesday and Wednesday are good days.  They are workhorse days. If you post of these days you usually get a reasonable number of hits.
  • Friday light non- political subjects do well. People are ready to go, take time off work or leave early.  Further, the next day is Saturday so there is a lot of momentum lost as you can read about Saturday for posting to your blog, it is the worst.  People are tired of CNN and all the political nonsense. Even the politicians. Things to do on the weekend and travel type posts do well obviously.
  • Saturday is the worst day to post to your blog-Everyone is either shopping, spending time with the kids at the gym or day tripping. Life is too short to spend online. Saturday is not a supper day for traffic or posting.

Posting to your blog and search engines

The way WordPress is set up is every time you create a new post, WordPress will ping it around the Internet.  This means blogging search engines and Google will become aware of it and feature it for your keywords on their blog search in reverse chronological order.

Further, I have notices Google will feature new pages on their actual search very high for a short period of time.  I call this the honeymoon effect.  I think they are testing to see if people will like this post or page. Google will observer user behavior. If people stay on the page for a while it will get brownie points and rank higher, if people bounce off it then it will rank lower in the long term.

Google is all about user behavior, links being only one factor in this. Therefore , does it matter what day of the week you post to your WordPress blog? I think yes. If you can take it a step further than simply the day but the type of content people search for on that day and time.

Do I do this myself.  Only Somewhat do I consider what day to post on. I mean I like to post on Sunday and Thursdays (the best days to Post) , however, if I write  a post on a Saturday I do not wait until Sunday  to post it.  I know many people advise this. For be blogging is more fun for me, and somewhat connected to my business on other blogs, but I guess I have the general philosophy if the write a good post on a day, people will find it in the long run anyway.

Tags: