Behind the Scenes: A Month of Letters

When most of us think of LetterMo, we imagine pens and favourite stationery, collections of interesting stamps, stacks of correspondence awaiting response, and happy, full mailboxes. But behind all that flurry of postal communications is our website, which facilitates it all. So, we thought it would be fun to pull back the curtain a bit and share what a Month of Letters looks like from our website’s point of view.

From searching for new pen pals, checking addresses, posting in our forums, and reading our amazing blog posts :), our website served up 46.6K pages to over 4.3K visitors during February last year, which averages out to just over a page every minute for the entire month. Perhaps it is not surprising that we get a lot of traffic in February, but we learned that January is also a very busy month on our website with almost the same amount of traffic as participants dust off their profiles and new participants hear about and sign up for LetterMo.

While January and February are our busiest months, we also learned that LetterMo brings people back all year long. Some of it is people continuing to receive and send responses after February, but a number of our participants send letters to their pen pals year round, and you can see that reflected in our traffic. Even our slowest month, November, had around 300 visitors and 1.7K pages viewed. All in all, our site was viewed 134K times in 2024 by 9.5K visitors!

While perusing our membership list reveals that LetterMo is an international community, it was fun to see that represented in our website traffic. The country with the most traffic on our site was the United States, which isn’t surprising given that LetterMo began there 15 years ago. But it has not stayed there. The United Kingdom, Canada, Germany, and Australia round out the top five countries in our site traffic. But as you can see on the map below, which shows all the page views from 2024 by country, we have visitors from countries on every continent of the world.

This brings us to an intentional decision in how we have designed this site. You may have noticed that we tend to use images sparingly around here, and the ones we do use have been optimized for file size. We do this because we want our site to load quickly wherever you may be located in the world while also keeping our costs low. Our hope is that whether you are visiting our site from North America, Oceania, or Africa, that your experience on it is a good one!

For a community built around sending physical mail, our website generates a fair amount of email traffic! Every time a new participant signs up, you make a friendship request, send a message, or post to our forums, email notifications are generated. And those emails add up. A lot.

In fact, our site sends more emails than we realized. In the first few days of LetterMo 2024, we discovered we were having problems with emails not being delivered, which jammed up participant sign ups and meant that people weren’t being notified of friendship requests or seeing messages sent to them by other participants. It turns out our server wasn’t designed to handle all those emails and was choking on them. Luckily, we got our emails moved over to a proper email delivery provider, and the notifications have been flowing ever since!

While we don’t know exactly how many emails went out last February since we started with our new vendor partway through the month, it seems safe to estimate that it was at least 3,000 messages. We are watching closely this year to see what a Month of Letters email looks like.