What your website's visitor numbers actually tell you

Most people open their website's numbers once. They see a small figure, decide the numbers are not telling them anything, and never look again. The figure was probably real and useful. What was missing was a second figure to compare it with. Read honestly and once a month, a few small counts will tell you more than any score on a dashboard.

Small numbers are normal

A new site for a small business might get thirty visits in a month, and half of them the week you put the link in a group chat. Nothing is broken. That is simply how many people you have pointed at the page so far. With counts that small, a change of one or two means nothing, so do not rewrite your homepage because a Tuesday dipped. Watch three or four weeks before you conclude anything, and keep the four lines somewhere you can reread, because the view in front of you will only be showing you this week.

The four things worth writing down

Once a month, five minutes, four lines with the date on them:

1. How many visits, and which page each visitor landed on first.
2. Which pages were opened most.
3. Which of your actions got used: the phone number tapped, the map opened, the form sent.
4. How many real enquiries came in, and how you knew about each one.

Numbers three and four are the ones that pay. A visit is someone looking. An enquiry is someone deciding.

One month, one baker, four lines

Say a baker checks her numbers on the first of the month and writes this down:

• 64 visits. 51 landed on the home page, 9 on the cake page, 4 on contact.
• The phone number was tapped 6 times. The enquiry form was sent 0 times.
• Two enquiries, both by phone.

That is already enough to act on. People arrive, most of them do not go deeper, and the phone is the thing that works. So this month's change is small: put the number and the order-by date on the cake page too, and cut the form down to three fields, in case it was simply too long to finish. Next month, write the same four lines. One change tied to one number, then look again: that is the whole method.

Numbers that look important and are not

• Bounce rate. Someone who read your whole page and then left is counted exactly like someone who left in a second.
• Time on page. A tab left open in a pocket reads as attention.
• A score out of 100 from a tool you never asked. It is grading its own checklist, not whether anyone rang you.
• Your own visits. Every time you check the site on your phone, you are a visitor. Subtract a few in your head.
• One spike. A single share that sent twenty people is a spike. The same twenty every week is a trend.

The question the numbers never answer

Numbers describe what happened. They never say why. So ask. Put one line in the reply to every enquiry: "How did you find me?" Ask it on the phone, at the door, at the counter. Three answers in a month beat any figure on a dashboard. If everybody says a friend told them, then your next free hour belongs with that friend, not in the page layout.

What to do with a quiet month

• Thirty visits and no enquiries? The page is the problem. Check the first screen says what you sell and offers one obvious next step, and confirm your form actually arrives.
• Three visits? The page is not the problem. Something has to point at it: your Google listing, your social profile, your email signature, the foot of your invoices.
• Enquiries coming, but slowly? Notice which route people used, and make that route easier to find on every screen.

You do not need to install anything to start doing this. If your host or builder shows you a number, use it. If nothing shows you anything, count enquiries instead and ask each person how they arrived. Either way you end up with one honest measurement a month, which is more than most small sites ever get.

Sitewright is still being built, so there is nothing to sign up for yet and no date being promised; the waitlist on the home page is the only thing that is open. What is above works on any site, built any way, by anyone, today. If you want the one email when there is something to try, you can join the waitlist.