Torrent site 1337X has unveiled a new site design after picking up lots of new traffic from former Torrentz and Kickass Torrents users. The site is readying a new online forums section as well as it continues to gain new users and challenge No. 1 traffic leader The Pirate Bay.

Torrenting Shakeup

We've been reporting on the big shakeup in the torrenting world that began this summer with the sudden shutdown of the top-visited torrent site, Kickass Torrents. Following that site's demise, two other popular file-sharing sites, meta search engine Torrentz, and Torrenthound, also bit the dust voluntarily.

In the wake of the demise of several of the most visited torrent sites, users began searching in earnest for alternatives. While the largest beneficiary of the migration was The Pirate Bay, along with several mirrors of the now-defunct Kickass Torrents and Torrentz, other sites such as Extratorrent and Rarbg also grew as a result.

1337X: New Site Design And Features

Another site that made significant traffic gains after the shakeout was 1337X. The site now ranks firmly in the top five most used torrent sites. The site's home page, however, is currently blocked in Google search results, because of a previous design that included specific torrent listings.

This has limited the site's potential reach, so a new site design was just implemented, which now resembles that of The Pirate Bay in that it only includes the site name and a search box.

"Due to our old index being blocked by search engines, new users were having issues finding the website. We developed a new index page that contains only search, so we don't get blocked by search engines in the future," states a notice on the newly designed site splash page.

"Seeing how cool a responsive layout could look we decided to make a whole new frontend. That literally took months to develop, and we changed backend code as well, which fixed several bugs and issues that were in the old version," said an operator at 1337X.

Soon, the site will also unveil new user forums, in an attempt to emulate the community feel of some of its competitors and encourage more registrations, which remain optional and not required in order to access content. Former number one torrent site Kickass Torrents was particularly known for its active forum community and 1337X clearly hopes to attract former users of that site as its traffic gains challenge the spot of current No. 1 torrent site The Pirate Bay.