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2025 Year in Review

It's been a wild year at SaskLakes! Our community has grown like crazy, I've added tons of new features, info and resources to the site, and we're just getting started. Here's a look back at what we explored, shared, and talked about most in 2025.

The website (789k page views) and Facebook page (20.3 million views) have both had exponential growth this year.

Table of Contents

New Features & Major Updates in 2025

This was a busy year, and I'm sure I missed a few features/tools that I've added to the site, but these are the highlights.

Over the past year, I've added and expanded a number of features and info sections

  • Live wildfire coverage & fire pages
    Real-time wildfire maps and incident pages during the 2025 fire season
    Not actively updated since fall

  • Improved photo browsing and uploads
    Faster loading, better organization, and easier community photo submissions, plus the ability to comment on and favourite photos

  • Lake-related news
    Started adding relevant lake, recreation, and outdoor news from across Saskatchewan

  • Beaches page
    Added a list of public beaches with a map and pulled in the provincial healthy waters testing data as well

  • SaskLakes Physical Products I had some physical products made this year including hats, toques and Len Thompson fish hooks. You can pick them up at Classic Outdoors in Saskatoon and Tourism Prince Albert.

  • 70 Lakes for 70 Years
    Dad celebrated turning 70 by swimming in 70 Saskatchewan Lakes

  • Yearly fish stocking report pages
    Interactive maps and summaries of stocked waters in the province for each year

  • Ice fishing content & guides
    Ice fishing content including an interactive map with ice conditions/access reports from users

  • SaskLakes YouTube Channel
    This is where longer form and higher resolution videos will be hosted, just getting started right now!

  • Media coverage
    SaskLakes was featured by:

    • CKOM / CJME
    • SaskNow / PaNow
    • SaskToday
    • The Washington Post

I still have thousands of photos and videos from the summer to upload to the site, and I don't even have a total count for how many lakes I visited this year, it will be well over 100 lakes again this year!

What's next for SaskLakes

I've got a ton of new ideas but a few things to look forward to over the next year will be:

  • Live Lake Cameras
  • Lots more user generated content (photos, comments, questions, reports)
  • Better interactive maps on many pages
  • More pages (rivers, paddling, ???)
  • Business Directory
  • Camping/Accommodation Search Tool
  • More tools for tracking your experiences, catches, and trips.
  • Is there something you would like to see on the site? Let me know!

Website

The traffic growth on the website has been incredible. The site really only started to get traction on Google in the spring. It's been linked to from a lot of bigger sites, and Facebook has also driven a lot of traffic to the site.

SaskLakes.ca had 789,596 page views in 2025. In 2024 there were only 107,887 page views that's a 731% increase in just one year!

Wildfires dominated traffic in 2025, especially during spring/summer. The search page also started getting quite a bit of use this year. The beaches page which I started working on late in the summer was quite popular, it will be even better for next summer. The Ice Fishing Guide page which still needs work has also picked up a lot of traffic in just the last few months. I've got more updates for that which will be coming out this winter.

  1. Fires Page - 191,845 views
  2. SaskLakes Homepage - 55,433 views
  3. SHOE Fire - 54,911 views
  4. Search - 42,382 views
  5. BUHL Fire - 23,754 views
  6. Ice Fishing Guide - 11,797 views
  7. Gem Lakes Fire Article - 11,453 views
  8. Beaches - 11,102 views
  9. Firebans - 10,864 views
  10. PISEW Fire - 9,955 views

Based on total page views these lake pages got the most views.

  1. Lovering Lakes - 2,243 views
  2. Last Mountain Lake - 2,237 views
  3. Emma Lake - 2,224 views
  4. Lake Diefenbaker - 2,147 views
  5. Candle Lake - 2,106 views

Most Googled Lakes (Search Traffic)

The lakes people searched for the most:

This data comes from Google Search Console and reflects what people were actively looking for, not just clicking on.

Photos

This is a feature I'm really excited about. I love seeing the photos coming in from across the province. I especially appreciate getting a chance to see lakes I haven't been able to visit personally yet. I've been working on improving the photo uploader, and you can now add comments and favourite photos as well. I'm going to keep working on this and I will be sharing more updates over the next few months.

The best part in my opinion is that over a third of the new photos added to the site this year were uploaded by site users and not by myself! This is amazing because not only do we see photos from places I haven't been, but they are also usually much nicer pictures than I'm able to get. Lots of times I don't have the nicest weather when I'm at the lake and that impacts my photos.

  • 2,973 new photos uploaded total
  • 1,066 new photos submitted by the community

If you have photos you'd like to share with the community you can upload them here.

Most Photographed Lakes

These lakes had the most new photos uploaded for them this year.

Comments & Discussion

This is a part of the site I still need to do a lot of work on. It has a ton of potential as a way for people to ask questions about lakes, and also share their experiences and reports. You can add comments to lakes, as well as photos, and there is also a reporting system for ice conditions/access. Some pages also can be commented on and this will be rolled out in more places on the site going forward.

  • 282 comments total
  • 136 comments from users (not me)

You can add a comment to a photo from the photos page, and to any lake from the lake pages.

Most Commented Lakes

Social Media

This was a fun year on social media, I've tried out a few new things including more videos, setting up a community FB group and starting a SaskLakes YouTube channel.

Facebook

Facebook was the big one for SaskLakes this year. The SaskLakes Facebook Page received 20.3 million views during 2025. We also picked up over 15,400 new followers!

Instagram

Growth on the SaskLakes Instagram page has been much slower this year. If you have an IG account, I'd really appreciate a follow!

YouTube

I just started working on the SaskLakes YouTube channel this fall. This is where longer, higher-resolution videos will be hosted. Please like and subscribe if you have a YouTube account, it will help me get this off the ground quicker! :)

Making SaskLakes Sustainable

SaskLakes is totally funded and built by myself (Matt Siemens) with no outside support or funding. It's something I love working on, but in the long term I do want to see it become sustainable and self-funding. The site still isn't profitable, but there's real progress, including the launch of advertising and a Support SaskLakes page for those who want to support the project.

My goal isn't to turn this into a content farm or clutter the site with ads. It's to build something reliable, independent, and useful and to make sure it can keep growing and serving the community going forward.

Thank You

Whether you uploaded photos, left comments, shared a link, or were just along for the ride, thank you! SaskLakes continues to grow because of the community behind it.

I especially want to thank anyone who took the time to email me, or leave a comment about finding the site/page useful. It means a lot to me to know I'm building something that people are using, I really appreciate it!

See you at the lake in 2026!
- Matt Siemens, the guy behind SaskLakes

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