How can I see who is online for my WordPress site?
Suppose you have ever been curious about how many users might be active on your website at any given time. In that case, we’ll be looking at various ways to track and monitor your website’s user activity easily.
Tracking your website users actively is a great way to extract vital information on who accesses your site and what they do. This can be beneficial when you are trying to grow your website and/or business and win over new customers.
Using the data gained, you can create a much more rewarding experience for users. It is also vital when planning new strategies to know and understand what your users are looking for and implementing new ideas around data-driven feedback.
Tracking users and their activities is also a great way to monitor and be aware of any potential security risks like malicious activity or threats. Often these attacks would be reflected in the tracking data and logs and can help with taking action to protect your site from possible hackers looking for exploits.
There are various methods for tracking live users on your website, let’s have a look, starting with the easiest ones, using website traffic checkers.
Website Traffic Checkers
It must be noted that traffic checker websites will not deliver you the most accurate numbers. That being said, it does not mean that they can still serve as a good indicator of how your website is performing, as well as what keywords might be ranking.
They can also be used to spy on your competitors, as you can use them to see how competing websites are performing.
The example we included was specifically chosen. SimilarWeb does not require you to sign up and create an account to do a quick dive on a website.
SimilarWeb is a digital intelligence provider that offers a visual dashboard driven by web analytics data. This is particularly useful for medium to enterprise-level businesses looking to capitalize on rankings and user engagement.
SimilarWeb is an insightful intelligence tool that can be used not only to gather data on your website but also to give you an idea of what your competitors might be up to.
It offers a rich visual dashboard of information on a site’s rank, traffic, referring sites, keywords, and even user geography, to name a few.
Plugins:
With WP Activity Log’s comprehensive feature list, this plugin can keep detailed logs of user activity.
WP Activity Log tracks various changes and details on your website once installed.
It will keep logs of changes in your pages and posts, user profiles, WordPress core, plugins and themes and even changes in the database. It even logs changes in your WooCommerce store and your products.
WP Activity Log has built-in integration with third-party plugins like WooCommerce, Yoast, and Gravity Forms, to mention a few. It also supports SMS and email notification.
Google Analytics is probably the most well-known analytics tool currently, being made by Google, this is not surprising. This plugin is jam-packed with a comprehensive list of features that will deliver invaluable insights into your website’s performance as well as its audience.
With seamless integration with other Google products, like Google Adsense and Data Studio, it also gives you access to some of the world’s largest databases.
There is a bit of a learning curve when setting it up, and you might require some technical knowledge, but it might be well worth investing the time and effort.
The amount of information that can be gained from using Google Analytics can be game-changing when planning for your next marketing strategy.
With this tool, you can easily track your online visitors and see exactly how long they stayed, which pages they went to, and how they accessed your website.
With over 3 million installs, MonsterInsights is one of the more popular tracking tools available today. MonsterInsights allows you to easily connect your WordPress site to Google Analytics and monitor a whole host of vital traffic and user activities on any WordPress site.
A key feature of MonsterInsights is the ability to enable advanced Google analytics right inside your WordPress dashboard, providing you with instant traffic and site performance monitoring.
The user-friendly dashboard will provide you with clear and concise information on real-time statistics, referral sources, top traffic sources, form conversions and even enhanced e-commerce Tracking, to mention a few.
