4. Your visitor stats
Your stats show how many people visited and which pages they read. Watch the direction of travel over months rather than day-to-day numbers, which move around for no useful reason.
You can see how your website is doing without needing to become an analyst. A few numbers matter; most do not.
4.1 Where to look
Sign in to your website and choose Stats or Analytics from the left-hand menu. The overview shows visitors over time and which pages they spent time on.
4.2 The numbers worth your attention
- Visitors — roughly how many people came. Compare this month to the same month last year, not to yesterday.
- Top pages — what people actually came to read. This is often the most useful thing on the screen, and it is frequently a surprise.
- Where they came from — search engines, social media, or people typing your address directly.
4.3 What not to worry about
Daily numbers jump around for reasons that have nothing to do with your business — a quiet Sunday, a bank holiday, one person refreshing a page. A single bad day means nothing. Three months of steady decline means something, and that is the sort of pattern we watch for on your behalf.
4.4 A caution about counting
No two tools count visitors the same way, so if you compare these figures with another service the totals will differ. That is normal. What matters is that you compare the same measure with itself over time.
4.5 Want to know what it means?
Ask. We would far rather spend ten minutes explaining what you are looking at than have you draw the wrong conclusion from a chart.
Still stuck?
You have a steward, not a ticket queue. Reach out and a real person from the valley will answer.