Docs · Earn & grow

Visitors

Visitors shows who comes to your site, where they come from and what they read. It's counted on your own site: there's nothing to sign up for, no code to paste, and no Google Analytics needed.

Open it from Visitors in the menu on the left, or click Open Visitors on the dashboard.

It works straight away

Counting starts as soon as fastCMS is updated. There's nothing to set up.

You aren't counted while you're logged in, so your own visits don't fill up your numbers. To check it's working, open your site on your phone, or in a private browser window (in Chrome: the ⋮ menu → New Incognito window). Your visit appears within seconds.

Search engine robots and other automatic visitors aren't counted either.

The overview

At the top, choose the dates: Today, Yesterday, 7 days, 30 days, This month, Last month, This year, 12 months, All time, or Custom (pick any two dates).

Show by changes the chart to hours, days, weeks, months or years. fastCMS picks a sensible one for you.
Compare with the period before adds a dashed line for the same length of time just before, and the numbers show how much they went up or down.
On your site now (top right) is how many people looked at a page in the last 5 minutes. It updates by itself.

The big numbers:

Visitors: people who visited. Someone who comes back on another day counts again.
Visits: each time someone came. A visit ends after 30 minutes without a new page.
Page views: every page looked at.
Pages per visit: how many pages people read in one visit. Higher is better.
Time on site: how long a visit lasts, on average.
Left after one page: visits that ended after a single page (often called the "bounce rate"). Lower is better.

The chart shows page views as bars and visitors as a line. Point at it to see the exact numbers. Click a bar to look closer at that day, week or month.

Going deeper

Everything works the same way:

Click any row (a page, a source, a country, a device…) to see only those visits. The whole page changes to show just them: their chart, their pages, where they came from.
The chip at the top ("Source: Pinterest ✕") shows what you're looking at. Click ✕ to go back. You can combine them: click a country, then a page.
See all at the bottom of a card opens the full list. Sort it by clicking a column heading, search it, or click Download (CSV) to open it in a spreadsheet.
The line at the top ("Visitors › Sources › Pinterest") shows where you are. Click any part of it to go back.

Your dates stay the same as you click around.

The cards

Top pages: what people read most. Click one to see where its readers came from.
How people found you:
Search engines (Google, Bing…);
Social networks (Pinterest, Facebook, Reddit, Bluesky…);
AI assistants (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude…);
Email (your email digest);
Ads;
Other websites;
Typed in or bookmarked.
Where visitors came from: the exact search engine, network or website.
Countries: worked out from each visitor's time zone, not their location.
Devices: phone, tablet or computer, plus browsers and systems.
First pages and Last pages: where visits start (usually the page people found in search) and where they end.
Campaigns: visits from your tagged links. Auto-posts show as autopost, the email digest as digest.
Websites that link here: the exact sites sending you visitors.
Best times: when people read your site, by day and hour. Darker means busier. A good guide to when to publish.
Recent visits: the latest visits, with the pages each one looked at, in order. Visits are anonymous.

Privacy

Visitors needs no cookies and no cookie banner, and nothing is sent to anyone else.

Visits are told apart with a scrambled code made from the visitor's IP address, their browser and a secret that changes every day.
The IP address itself is never stored, and nobody can be followed from one day to the next.
Countries come from the visitor's time zone.

Your Privacy Policy should still mention that you count visits. In Visitors → Settings, click Add to my Privacy Policy and fastCMS adds a short, accurate section to it.

Settings

Open Visitors → Settings to:

switch counting off or on;
choose how long visit details are kept (1 month to 2 years; 6 months to start). Daily totals are kept for ever, so your charts always go back to the beginning. Filters and Recent visits need the details, so they only reach back as far as you keep them;
add IP addresses that shouldn't be counted (for example your office). Add my address fills in the one you're using now;
Delete all stats to start again.