How one of Netherlands' biggest men blogs broke its traffic record using Newsifier

One of Netherlands' biggest men blogs

VKMAG.com is one of Netherlands' biggest and most recognized men's blogs. The website started in 2002 and has been going strong ever since, entertaining its visitors with a mix of showbiz news, humor, and viral videos.
‍

The problems VKMAG faced running their website on Expression Engine

Since 2004 the website has been running on the Expression Engine CMS. However, the website's code became increasingly harder to maintain and this was not the only problem VKMAG faced. 

The other problems were:

• Their website faced too much downtime.

• The website became slow during traffic peaks.

• With an outdated editor, publishing articles and especially embedding social posts took too much time.

• VKMAG attracts a lot of traffic from social media but sharing articles across all social media channels was taking a lot of time. 

• VKMAG was attracting almost no traffic from Google.
  
  
• VKMAG wanted to launch native mobile apps but the cost of building two native mobile apps (Android and iOS) turned out to be really expensive.

• The owners of VKMAG felt the website's design was becoming outdated.

‍

The results of the switch to Newsifier

‍

In 2021 VKMAG decided to make the switch from Expression Engine to Newsifier. They liked that Newsifier would provide weekly code and SEO updates and would continuously roll out new features that could help VKMAG grow.  

In September 2021 Newsifier migrated all of their articles (dating all the way back to 2002)) to the new website hosted by Newsifier. Using a specially developed redirect manager Newsifier ensured that there would be no loss in Google rankings of old articles.

The result of the switch to Newsifier

1. In August 2022 VKMAG broke its all-time high traffic record with the website generating 14.7 million page views per month.

2. The editors of VKMAG can now publish articles about 70% faster in comparison to when they were using the old editor.

3. Sharing articles across all social media channels and pushing notifications through their mobile apps has become a task that can be done within a matter of seconds rather than minutes.

4. Before switching to Newsifier it took around 10 minutes to post a news article on the Instagram timeline and on their Linkin bio page. With Newsifier's unique Instagram share feature, the same process now takes around 10 seconds. In this way VKMAG attracts close to 100.000 visitors from Instagram per month, which provides a lot of additional revenue.

5. Traffic from Google has grown by 21% in the first year after switching to Newsifier.

6. VKMAG got a redesign which made the website easier to use for its visitors and more attractive to advertisers.

7. VKMAG launched two mobile apps (iOS and Android) within one week by using Newisifier's unique mobile app solution, which attracted thousands of downloads already in the first weeks.

‍