The simple website getting 8.8 million monthly visitors

And how you can build sites like this too

Author

Ian H
January 28, 2025

This might be the most inspiring success story I’ve ever come across.

Ramesh Jha, a solo developer from India, built a dozen simple websites, two of which are now among the top 10,000 sites in the world (according to SimilarWeb).

From the income generated by his sites, he started a charitable foundation to raise awareness about the air pollution in his village.

I first stumbled on his websites (and subsequently his story) after browsing Site Stats Database for interesting niche ideas.

I found the very “niche” (but useful) website, portchecker.co (which gets a sweet 274,000 visitors per month).

The footer of the port checker site linked to another site, WordUnscrambler.me.

And this is where things get interesting.

This simple word unscrambler website gets a breathtaking 8.8 million visitors every month.

Most of the traffic is from search, but it gets a lot of direct traffic as well. Here’s the traffic source breakdown:

The footer of this site links to 4 more sites:

The about page links to his personal site (which links to even more of his sites), and gives a brief background of the site and what he’s been able to do with its profit:

He created the site as a fun weekend project. Now it gets millions of visitors each month. And with the ad revenue, he started a non-profit foundation.

Wildly inspiring.

A few of his other large sites include email-checker.net (411,000 monthly visitors), sipcalculator.in (463,000 monthly visitors), and syllablecounter.net (153,000 monthly visitors). There are more, which you can find on his personal website.

Combined, his sites bring in over 17,500,000 monthly visitors.

Assuming an ad RPM of $5 to $10, that would mean the monthly revenue generated is anywhere from $87,500 to $175,000.

How to build simple tool sites like these

Even non-coders like me can build sites like these with the help of AI.

I simply explained to ChatGPT that I wanted to build a word unscrambler site, and then asked it for step-by-step instructions on building it with WordPress.

I put ChatGPT’s responses in this Google Doc in case you want the goods. If you follow those steps and run into any problems, just ask ChatGPT for help.

Alternatively, you could build the site using an AI coding tool like Lovable or Cursor.

As an experiment, I tried using Lovable and actually got super close to a working word unscrambler tool and it took about 10 minutes.

It still has a pretty major bug in that it shows a bunch of combinations of letters that aren’t actually words, but that can be fixed with a bit more back-and-forth.

If you’d like, you can hit the “Edit with lovable” button and continue where I left off.

Pretty amazing what non-coders can build with AI!

How to get traffic to these sites

Building the site is the easy part.

Getting traffic is an entirely different beast.

The laziest approach would be to choose a super low-competition niche (not a word unscrambler site haha).

You can find easy niches in Ahrefs (find high volume keywords with low keyword difficulty and low DR sites ranking on the first page).

You can also use Site Stats Database to find easy niches. Filter by traffic above 10K/mo and then sort the database by youngest site or lowest Domain Authority. This will reveal a bunch of sites in ridiculously easy niches. Scroll through until you see online tool sites. Done.

You’ll also want to add relevant content to your site’s homepage. Much like Ramesh’s sites I linked to above.

With the on-page stuff taken care of, you’ll then want to build links and get some initial traction through online word-of-mouth.

Pay for a press release. Submit to Product Hunt and alternatives like BetaList and Uneed. Share on Hacker News and Reddit. If there’s a specific online community that would appreciate your site, share it there.

If you do all that, you’ll be well ahead of most people. There’s a good chance your site will start ranking and getting traffic if you chose an easy niche.

You can further increase your odds of success by building more links and ensuring that your site is easier to use or definitively better in some way than the competition. This will help a lot with link building. If your site is better than the rest, people will be more open to linking to it instead of the more established alternatives.

Even doing the above, chances are slim you’ll quickly climb to the top (unless you chose an extremely low-competition niche). SEO is a waiting game. It could be many months or even a few years.

I think a good strategy is to launch a bunch of simple websites, take the lazy marketing approach, wait a month or so to see which sites are doing the best, and then double down on those. Launching several sites greatly increases the odds you’ll find success.

Alright, that’s enough for today. I hope this email was inspiring!

Thanks for reading,

Ian

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