If I had to whittle down my favorite thing about CSS-Tricks to one thing — and like Tom Petty hits, there’s a lot of ’em — it’s that we take moments like this to hit Pause and simply write like humans. We’re a super technical site that gets into super technical web dev jargon and yet we’re just a set of people trying to learn together with other people and be better at what we do, whether that’s design, development, accessibility, performance, or any specialty flavor from the wide array of front-end responsibilities.
This is my tenth year here at CSS-Tricks. I remember when CSS-Tricks turned 10. It felt really old (in the best possible way) back then. So imagine how I feel about my age today.
What I’m ultimately trying to say is Thank You. Because of real people like you and the small team of folks who contribute here, I get to make this my day job. It’s the best job I’ve had in my life and it’s only possible because you keep showing up each day to read, learn, share, and discuss all-things-front-end (and a little CSS, of course) with us.
Thank you, thank you… thank you!
Allow me a chance to share some highlights from 2025 — a year with a bunch of milestones and (let’s say) interesting twists.
Overall Site Traffic
Table of Contents
Jumping straight to it: there were 20 million unique views in 2025. This is a huge drop-off from last year’s 26 million… and you can literally see the cliff in July when Google added AI summaries to the top of search results. So, yeah, we’re down an alarming 23% for the year, but the real month-over-month impact is more like 30%. Ouch.
It hurts — and I’m always quick to blame myself — but is also consistent with other sites I work with and what I’ve been hearing from other publishers in this space as we’ve compared battle notes.
I hate saying “it is what it is” but we really are in the midst of a new reality in digital publishing. I’m still trying to wrap my head around it because, obviously, eyeballs pay the bills around here and we’re going to have to adapt. There’s still plenty of reasons to make websites today. Making them sustainable, though? That’s getting harder, even if new CSS features are making the development way more fun.
Which brings me full circle to the start of this post: Thank you for showing up. It means the world to us and to me personally. The first and best way you can support CSS-Tricks is to continue showing up.
Publishing By The Numbers
Looking at a little history of how many articles we’ve published by year:
- 2020: 1,183 articles
- 2021: 890 articles (site acquired by DigitalOcean)
- 2022: 390 articles
- 2023: 0 articles (site paused)
- 2024: 153 articles (site resumed in late June)
This year? We’re looking at 255 articles. Considering there are 261 weekdays in 2025, that’s nearly an article per day… and we’re not done yet with the year. In fact, if we count this post and what’s left on the publishing calendar, we’re looking at exactly 261 articles for the year. It’s sorta like we’re your weekday companion at work!
That includes the largest infusion to the Almanac in a year, perhaps ever? We added 101 Almanac entries as of today (one for each Dalmatian) and will add three more by the end of the year. The Almanac is my favorite part of the site. Sure, you can get great CSS documentation from somewhere like MDN, but I think the time and effort we put into explaining CSS features like one developer talking to another sets us apart. Where else are you going to enjoy learning about a trigonometry function like atan2(), right?
Let’s Keep Talking About the Almanac
…because that’s the area we invested most of our time and energy. You may remember that the Almanac has historically been a spot to learn about CSS properties and pseudos. Last year, though, we stuffed the Almanac’s mouth with a fistful of steroids and gave it new sections so that we’re covering all the CSS features we possibly can, including functions, selectors, and at-rules.
If you can believe it, I’m pretty sure we’ve added every single at-rule this year. And we started the year with a big ol’ zero CSS functions and are ending with a whopping 64 of them.
We also spent time making the Almanac a little easier to navigate. For example, now you can get high-level information about any feature without having to click through to the full page:
And we label experimental and shorthand properties:
And you can dig into the constituent properties for each shorthand:
Things wouldn’t be complete without a little dash of modern CSS. We sprinkled in a little scroll-driven animation action for good measure:
The Team
I introduced y’all to Juan Diego Rodriguez and Ryan Trimble last year as regular contributors. They play a big role and I don’t know what I’d do without them. They’re my second and third pair of eyes anytime I’m unsure of something and, let’s face it, that’s often.
But now we have a fourth pair of eyes! Danny Schwarz has been a long-time contributor and he’s stepping up to help us stay on top of timely things. CSS is moving faster than I can remember and it’s easy for things to slip under the radar even when your day job is tracking this stuff. Danny has the eyes of a hawk and has started reporting what he finds in what we’re calling What’s !Important. The first edition went out just the other day and we’ll keep that up on a bi-weekly basis for now.
In between editions, Danny publishes a feed of Quick Hits that you can follow for even more web platform news and happenings.
It takes a village, my friends!
Goal Review
Time to check in on the things we set out to accomplish last year and did… or didn’t.
✅ Publish 1-2 new guides. Yes! We released CSS Color Functions and CSS Counters guides this past year. We actually nailed the goal back in June. I thought we might actually exceed the goal, but things settled down with all the work we put into the next goal.
✅ Fill in the Almanac. No need to rehash all the work. Last year at this time, I said, “We’ve only got a few pages in the at-rules and functions sections that we recently created and could use all the help we can get.” I never imagined we’d end the year with 104 new pages, including all of the at-rules. I can’t thank the likes of Juan Diego, Danny, Sunkanmi Fafowora, John Rhea, and Gabriel Shoyombo enough for going above and beyond to make this one happen. Again, I’m incredibly proud of this treasure trove of CSS documentation and believe it’s a core part of what CSS-Tricks is.
🚫 Restart the newsletter. Nope on this one, and not for lack of effort. The truth is there are administrative hurdles behind the scenes preventing it from happening. We’ll get there though! It’s a piece of CSS-Tricks that I miss so dang much. Perhaps that’s the next evolution of What’s !Important.
🔶 More guest authors. I’ll give this one a passing grade. We welcomed a handful of new faces, including long-time friends who wrote 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 fresh new set of faces publishing with us every month because that’s the sort of diversity that makes this community rich. We’re always accepting guest authors!
2026 Goals
RECOVER ALL THE LOST TRAFFIC! Just kidding, that’s only mildly in our control. We’ll continue the daily mission of serving you fresh, fun, and educational front-end goodness. While I’d like to tackle traffic woes head-on, the best plan will always be showing up and delivering the goods as best we can. In fact, we’ll carry over this year’s goals into the brand-new year. No need to shake up the recipe.
If I was given a magic lamp with one wish for the next year, I’d wish for full courses to be added to the site. I run a beginning level HTML/CSS online course separately and love how students interact with the lessons differently than the average reader interacts with a standalone tutorial or article. It’d be a moonshot to get something like that into CSS-Tricks in the next year, but I wouldn’t turn my nose up if the opportunity came up.
Again, Thank You!
Special thanks to DigitalOcean! It’s their backing that keeps this engine running, from hosting to finances and even helpful encouragement along the way. They have every right to do anything they want with this site and yet they choose to operate it like an independent publication. They’re not jamming their products and services down anyone’s throat, dictating the editorial direction of things, or constantly breathing down our necks. They’re good stewards and deserve a big collective high five!
A special shout out to Roxie Elliott for being the go-between on just about everything you can imagine. Her behind-the-scenes help has been incredibly valuable.
Like I said, it’s been an interesting year. Some ups, some downs, but plenty to be thankful for heading into what will be this site’s 19th birthday come July 2026. Nineteen years. Blockbuster still had a site then!
Thank you, Chris Coyier, for writing that very first blog post.
