Let the swiping begin. Ladies and gentlemen, charge your phones and ready those index fingers, because the first Sunday of the year is almost here and that means just one thing: there are plenty more fish in the online pool of love-seekers.

It’s not just all those Christmas engagement photos flooding your Facebook feed, all those questions that your single cousin had to dodge over her relationship status or the fact that you have the FarmersOnly.com jingle stuck in your head after being parked in front of the TV for most of the holidays – the beginning of the year is the busiest time for online dating sites.

Plenty of Fish, a free online dating service with three million daily users, expects to see sign-ups jump 24% over the course of the day, with the peak happening around 6pm ET on the first Sunday of the year. A total of 81,000 people are expected to sign up for the dating site that day.



“The numbers are set to pay off for hopeful singles,” said Shannon Smith, public relations and communications manager at Plenty of Fish. “Users who sign up during the first week of January will find their partner an average of two weeks faster than those who sign up later, taking an average of just 10 weeks compared to an average of 12 weeks throughout the year.”

Match.com also said its busiest time of the year is the Sunday after New Year’s Day.

“It’s as close to a national holiday for single daters as you can get. Match has proclaimed it ‘Dating Sunday’, and with good reason,” writes Julie Spira, an online dating expert and the founder of Cyber-Dating Expert, on Match.com’s blog.

Last year, the site invited users to “come join the biggest online party of the year” – signups generally peak just before 9pm ET.

“Match.com found that 51% of singles’ New Year’s resolutions will be to socialize more and focus on finding that special someone, making the desire to connect with someone a driving force for singles to get online and holidays,” Amarnath Thombre, president of Match.com, said in 2014.

Other sites have, however, confirmed higher number of sign-ups early in the year. How About We told Today.com that its membership goes up 40% in January and February. For ChristianMingle.com, new memberships go up 41% between Christmas and Valentine’s Day.

Even swiping on Tinder will be more plentiful this weekend.

“Generally speaking, Tinder use sees a spike during the beginning of the New Year,” Tinder spokeswoman said.

According to Washington Post, it’s not just dating sites that see a spike in traffic around this time of the year. There is also post-holiday spike in searches for pornography, condom sales, conceptions and people changing their relationship status.