May 15, 2018

How to Check Website Traffic

Perhaps you want to monitor your own website’s traffic, or keep tabs on a competitor’s website. Whether you’re trying to win new fans or customers, or you’re just really curious about how popular your content is, there are many tools available that can help you. There are a number of methods that can be used from your own website, though some of these provide more of an estimate than a hard number. Other methods are more technical, and may exceed your needs. No matter what your professional needs are, learning how to monitor your web traffic and that of your competitors can help you ensure that your business succeeds.

Monitoring Traffic from Your Own Website
Monitoring Traffic Using Plugins and Websites
Tracking Competitors’ Websites

Method 1

Monitoring Traffic from Your Own Website

Access your webpage statistics. If you’re using a platform like WordPress, it’s very easy to access your site’s stats. These features come built into the web platform for easy tracking and maintenance, and will give you an accurate picture of your webpage’s traffic.

If you’re on WordPress, click on Dashboard, to the upper left hand side. Beneath it, you’ll see several categories.
Click on My Blogs. Next to your highlighted primary blog, you’ll see a small icon with a graph inside of it labeled Stats. Open it to reveal your website’s over all traffic.

Image titled Check Website Traffic Step 2

2
Check the number of blog post comments. One easy and free way to get a ballpark idea of how many people visit your site is to check how many people leave comments. Obviously, not everyone who visits your website will leave comments. But on average, about one in every 200 readers leaves a comment, and knowing that statistic can help you to broadly estimate your website traffic.
- Go to the webpage’s “comments” section.
- If the page does not list the number of comments, count them manually.
- Multiply the number of comments by 200 for a ballpark average of how many viewers your page has had.
- Remember that this method is not 100 percent accurate. This is merely to give yourself a rough estimate, based on average percentages.
3
Go to your homepage’s video section. If you embedded YouTube or Vimeo in your website, all you need to do is go to a video and click to play it. Both YouTube and Vimeo will show how many views your video received, but only if the videos are publicly shared. If they aren’t, you won’t be able to see how much traffic was flowing through the site.
- Look to the lower right hand side right below the video screen, and you’ll see a number. That number reflects how many visitors your video has had.
- Keep in mind that the amount of views recorded doesn’t necessarily correspond to actual views. That number includes people who briefly clicked on it and then left as well, but it should help you get a rough idea of your web traffic.