Measure And Monitor Your WordPress Website Traffic
Measuring and monitoring your WordPress website traffic is something every website owner and website administrator should do. Your website traffic will give you a quick check of the overall health of your WordPress site and the mood of your visitors.
As your growing your WordPress website, you are adding content regularly. And as you add this content, your user traffic count should be growing and improving.
People should be visiting more pages and staying longer. They should be interacting with you in some way. It could be submitting a form, reading a blog post, signing up for your newsletter, or buying something. It could even be connecting with you on a more personal level like social media.
There are ways you can see if you’re reaching more people and if these people are resonating with your content. If you see a dip in visitor activity or if your traffic seems a little flat, you may need to reconsider content topics or consider new methods for driving traffic to your website.
These are my favorite tools for measuring and monitoring my WordPress website traffic.
The Best Tools For Monitoring WordPress Website Traffic
Tool 1: Google Search Console
Google Search Console is free for all websites and very useful in providing you information about your WordPress website traffic.
Here you’ll find information like:
- What keywords you’re showing up for in Google Searches
- What your click-through rate (CTR) is, and
- Where you’re ranking in the results (SERP) for those keywords.
Like most reports, you can view these statistics over different periods of time like “last 7 days”, “last 28 days”, “last 3 months” and so on. In the new Google Search Console interface, you’ll see an initial Performance graph at the top. This graph will automatically show data for the last 3 months. You’ll want to click “OPEN REPORT” over on the right so you can drill down, see more information about those clicks and for different periods of time.
Once you open the Performance report, you can change the graph to see trends in clicks, impressions, CTR, and position. Below that you can even find the exact keywords that you’re showing up for and which ones people are clicking on and much more. There is so much you can learn from Google Search Console and specifically the Performance report.
If you really want to dive deep into the Performance report, you should check out this awesome guide by Backlinko.com.
Tool 2: Google Analytics
Google Analytics is also is free for all websites and very useful in giving you information about your WordPress website traffic. This is a very comprehensive tool and can be a little overwhelming.
If you’re not ready or willing to spend the time to really dig into this data, make sure you still go ahead and get a free account and connect it to your site. Like the Google Search Console, this is the kind of tool that has to collect data to be useful.
You’ll find the following basic reports and much more:
- Audience Reports – These reports offer information about the users visiting your website.
- Acquisition Reports – These reports provide insight into how users get to your website, and how well your digital marketing and advertising works across different channels like email, search, and display ads.
- Behavior Reports – These reports show how users interact with your website. This can include many different things from what content users view to how they navigate between pages.
Once you set up your account, install a free Google Analytics plugin that you can find in the WordPress plugin repository. The plugin I like best is Google Analytics Dashboard for WP by ExactMetrics. It places a nice widget in your WordPress admin dashboard and allows you to quickly change the time and the metrics that you’re viewing.
And then when you’re ready to really dive in, you can check out the videos on Google Analytics Academy. There you’ll learn how to navigate the Google Analytics interface and reports, and set up dashboards.
What You Should Do Now To Begin Monitoring Your WordPress Website Traffic
- Sign up for Google Search Console and add your website
- Sign up for Google Analytics and connect it to your website
- Define the goals of your website and what actions you want visitors to take
- Use these tools to measure your goals and take appropriate actions based on what you find
If you have questions about your WordPress website traffic, please leave them in the comments below or send me a message.
I invite you to find out more about my WordPress services and the monthly WordPress maintenance plans I offer.
