My Homepage Said 35K. The Real Number Was 518K.

Five of the project cards on my homepage carried little traffic badges. 11K visitors a month on one, 10K on another, a few smaller ones below that. I typed every one of them by hand on some afternoon, copied straight off the Cloudflare dashboard, and they added up to just under 35K a month. I thought that was a decent story.

Yesterday I replaced the hand-typed story with a live one. A small API route now sits on the site itself. It asks Cloudflare for every domain in my account, pulls thirty days of analytics for each through the GraphQL API, adds it all up, and caches the answer for twelve hours. The route returns plain JSON with visits, views, and the domain count, so anything on the site can use it. The whole thing took an afternoon with my coding agent, plus one read-only API token.

The first real response came back with 517,539 visits and 1,058,626 pageviews, spread across eighteen domains.

The badges said 35K. The account said half a million.

Two things produced that gap, and both of them are ordinary. The typed numbers went stale the day after I typed them, because updating stats by hand is a chore and chores lose to everything else on the list. And only five projects ever got a badge in the first place. The other thirteen domains served traffic the whole time with nothing on the homepage saying so. Neither problem was a lie exactly. The page just kept telling a story from months ago while the real one grew without me.

The part that keeps this from being a flex is what the same day did to my other numbers. The top of my homepage also claimed 20 projects shipped and 2+ years building. When I checked those against evidence I could point to, the commit history and the live URL checks supported 15 projects and about 18 months. So those came down the same day the traffic went up. Wiring your claims to their sources cuts in both directions, and it should. A smaller number a stranger can verify beats a bigger one they have to take on faith.

The rule I took away: if a number matters enough to put on your homepage, it matters enough to wire to its source. Stats that update themselves cannot rot. And when wiring is impossible, floor the claim and date it. “500K+ visits as of July 2026” fails softly when things change. A precise stale number just sits there being wrong with confidence.

Status today: the grand total on my homepage is live and re-pulls twice a day. I will never hand-edit that number again. The five per-site badges are still typed by hand, which means they are already rotting again as I write this. They are next.

If you have numbers on your own site, try this. Add up what the pages claim, then go look at what the source says. Mine were off by roughly half a million. Yours will be off too. The only question is which direction, and either answer is worth having.