If I had to boil down my favorite thing about CSS-Tricks to one thing – and like Tom Petty’s hits, there are many – it’s that at times like this we hit pause and just write like humans. We’re a super technical site dealing with super technical web development jargon and yet we’re just a group of people trying to learn with other people and get better at what we do, whether that’s design, development, accessibility, performance, or some other specialty from the wide range of front-end responsibilities.
This is my tenth year here at CSS-Tricks. I remember when CSS-Tricks has turned 10 years old. It felt really old at the time (in the best way possible). So imagine how I feel Mine age today.
Ultimately what I’m trying to say is Thank you. Thanks to real people like you and the small team of people who contribute here, I can make this my day job. It’s the best job I’ve had in my life and that’s only possible because you keep coming every day to read, learn, share and discuss everything front-end (and a little CSS of course) with us.
Thank you, Thank you… Thank you!
Give me a chance to share some highlights from 2025 — a year with a lot of milestones and (dare we say) interesting twists.
General site traffic
Jump straight to it: there were 20 million unique views by 2025. This is a huge drop from last year’s 26 million… and you can literally see the cliff in July when Google has added AI summaries to the top of search results. So yes, we are down an alarming 23% this year, but the actual monthly impact is over 30%. Ouch.
It hurts – and I’m always quick to blame myself – but also consistent with other sites I work with and what I’ve heard from other publishers in this space when we compared battle notes.
I hate to say “it is what it is,” but we are truly in the midst of a new digital publishing reality. I’m still trying to wrap my head around it because it’s clear that the eyes are paying the bills here and we’re going to have to adapt. There still is plenty of reasons to create websites Today. But making them sustainable? That’s becoming increasingly difficult, even as new CSS features make development much more fun.
Which brings me full circle to the beginning of this post: Thanks for showing up. It means everything to us and to me personally. The first and best way you can support CSS-Tricks is to keep showing up.
Publishing in figures
Looking at a little history of how many articles we published per year:
- 2020: 1,183 articles
- 2021: 890 articles (site taken over by DigitalOcean)
- 2022: 390 articles
- 2023: 0 articles (site interrupted)
- 2024: 153 articles (site resumed at the end of June)
This year? We look at 255 articles. Considering there will be 261 weekdays in 2025, that’s almost an article per day… and we’re not done with the year yet. Counting this post and what’s left on the publishing calendar, we’re looking at precisely 261 articles for the year. It’s a bit like we are your weekday companion at work!
Including the largest infusion into the Almanac in a year, maybe ever? We have added 101 Almanac Entries starting today (one for each Dalmatian) and three more will be added by the end of the year. The Almanac is my favorite part of the site. Sure, you can get great CSS documentation from the likes of MDN, but I think the time and effort we put into explaining CSS features, like one developer talking to another, is what sets us apart. Where else are you going enjoy learn about a trigonometry function such as atan2()right?
Let’s keep talking about the Almanac
…because that is the area in which we have invested the most time and energy. You may remember that the Almanac has traditionally been a place to learn about CSS properties and pseudos. Last year, however, we filled the Almanac’s mouth with a handful of steroids and added new sections to it so we could cover all possible CSS features, including functions, selectors, and at-rules.
If you can believe it, I’m pretty sure we added every at-rule this year. And we started the year with a big ol’ zero CSS functions and end up with a whopping 64 of them.
We also spent time making the Almanac a little easier to navigate. For example, you can now get high-level information about each feature without having to click through to the full page:
And we label experimental and shorthand properties:
And you can go into the constituent properties for each abbreviation:
Things wouldn’t be complete without a little touch of modern CSS. For good measure, we’ve thrown in a little scroll-driven animation action:
The team
I introduced you to Juan Diego Rodriguez and Ryan Trimble as regular contributors last year. They play a big role and I don’t know what I would do without them. They’re my second and third sets of eyes when I’m unsure about something, and let’s face it, that’s often.
But now we have one fourth pair of eyes! Danny Schwarz is a long-time contributor and he does his best to help us stay informed on current affairs. CSS is moving faster than I can remember and it’s easy for things to slip under the radar, even if your day job is keeping up with things like this. Danny has the eyes of a hawk and has started reporting what he thinks about what we call What is !Important. The first edition was recently published and we will continue with it every two weeks for the time being.
Between editions Danny publishes a Quick Hits feed that you can follow for even more news and events on the web platform.
It takes a village, my friends!
Goal overview
Time to reflect on the things we wanted to achieve last year and that we did or didn’t do.
✅ Publish 1-2 new manuals. Yes! We’ve released guides for CSS color functions and CSS counters over the past year. We already achieved the goal in June. I thought we might overshoot the goal, but things settled down with all the work we put into the next goal.
✅ Complete the Almanac. There is no need to redo all the work. This time last year I said, “We only have a few pages in the at rules and functions sections we recently created and we need all the help we can get.” I never thought we would end the year with 104 new pages, including all the AT rules. I can’t thank people like Juan Diego, Danny, Sunkanmi Fafowora, John Rhea and Gabriel Shoyombo enough for going above and beyond to make this possible. Once again, I am incredibly proud of this wealth of CSS documentation and believe it is a core part of what CSS-Tricks is.
🚫 Restart the newsletter. No, not here, and not for lack of effort. The truth is that there are administrative hurdles behind the scenes that prevent this. Still, we’re getting there! It’s a piece of CSS trickery that I miss so much. Maybe that’s the next evolution of What’s!Important.
🔶 More guest authors. I give this a passing grade. We welcomed a handful of new faces, including old friends writing with us for the first time, like Andy Clarke, Mat Marquis, Jeff Bridgforth, Declan Childlow, Blackle Mori, Christian Sabourin, Sladjana Stojanovic and Darshan Siroya. Ideally, I’d like to see a new set of faces publishing with us every month, because that’s the kind of diversity that makes this community rich. We always accept guest authors!
Goals for 2026
RESTORE ALL LOST TRAFFIC! Just kidding, we only have limited control over that. We will continue the daily mission to bring you fresh, fun and educational front-end goodness. Although I would like to deal with the traffic problems, the best plan will always be to deliver the goods in the best possible way. In fact, we will carry this year’s goals into the brand new year. There is no need to shake the recipe.
If I were given a magic lamp with one wish for the coming year, I would want full courses to be added to the site. I run a beginner level HTML/CSS online course individually and love how students interact with the lessons differently than the average reader with a standalone tutorial or article. It would be a bull’s eye to get something like that into CSS-Tricks in the next year, but I wouldn’t turn up my nose if the opportunity presents itself.
Thanks again!
Special thanks to DigitalOcean! It’s their support that keeps this engine running, from hosting to finances and even helpful encouragement along the way. They have every right to do whatever they want with this site and yet they choose to operate it as an independent publication. They don’t shove their products and services down anyone’s throat, dictate the editorial direction of things, or breathe down our necks all the time. They are good stewards and deserve a big collective high five!
A special shout out to Roxie Elliott because you’re the go-between for just about everything you can think of. Her help behind the scenes has been incredibly valuable.
Like I said, it was a interesting year. Some ups, some downs, but plenty to be thankful for heading into what will be this site’s 19th anniversary in July 2026. Nineteen years. Blockbuster still had a site Than!
Thank you, Chris Coyier, for writing that very first blog post.
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