Track your site traffic

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Track your site traffic

Last updated September 25, 2026 19:41

Use the Traffic report to gain insight into your site's traffic and engagement, and get alerts when your traffic spikes or dips.

The Traffic panel, or Traffic overview in the Squarespace app, summarizes traffic and engagement on your site, tracking your audience's growth over time through three KPIs: Unique visitors, Visits, and Pageviews.

Get traffic alerts when your site traffic spikes or dips significantly.

Also try: Track your site content engagement, Track your site traffic sources

The Traffic panel is available in all plans. Traffic alerts are available in the Core, Plus, and Advanced plans. Learn more about choosing the right Squarespace plan.

Review your site traffic analytics

To view your site traffic report:

  1. Open the Analytics panel and click Traffic.
  2. Click the date range dropdown menu to filter by time frame. Data is available from January 2014.
  3. Click Unique visitors, Visits, or Pageviews to filter by that KPI. Depending on your date range, a percent change comparison may appear beneath each one.
  4. Click the ❗️icon to review site traffic alerts.

What does each metric mean?

Unique visitors

Unique visitors is your best measure of loyal audience and readership, because it estimates people rather than sessions or page loads.

Because we track it with a browser cookie, the same person counts again after clearing their cookies or switching browsers — so the number runs high for audiences that return often across devices.

Visits

Visits measure visitor attention on your site, since each visit is one browsing session. It's also the metric most marketing tools compare against.

One person can register several visits in a day: the tracking cookie expires after 30 minutes, so someone who closes their browser and returns later counts twice.

Pageviews

Pageviews counts page requests, so it runs highest of the three and tells you about content consumption rather than audience size.

Full page loads count, including pages in the Not linked section, collection item pages, and password-protected pages after a visitor enters the password. Requests for image URLs or scripts don't count, and neither do views of custom or default 404 pages.

Index pages in version 7.0

Views of pages in an index count two ways:

  • Viewing a sub-page from the main index page counts as a view of the index page, not the sub-page.
  • Viewing a sub-page directly from its own URL counts as a view of the sub-page, not the index.

To get more views on a specific sub-page, change how you share your index page.

The line graph shows trends over time for your selected KPI and time frame. Hover over any point for a specific date.

Click the Daily dropdown menu to change the time scale. Your options depend on how much data is available.

Tip: In the Squarespace app, the graph in the Traffic overview card also shows comparison data for the previous time frame.

Use the bar and pie charts to show KPI breakdown

When you're viewing the Visits KPI, the charts beneath the line graph break visits down four ways:

  • By device type: Mobile, computer, and tablet. Useful for comparing mobile traffic against computer traffic.
  • By source: Your top traffic sources, meaning where visitors came from before landing on your site.
  • By browser: Your top browsers, like Chrome or Firefox.
  • By operating system: Visits by operating system.

Tip: In the Squarespace app, device type data has its own card. Tap Analytics, then tap Device type. The graph shows total visits from your top device types, and the section beneath it lists every device type with its total visits and percentage.

Traffic alerts

Traffic alerts flag statistically significant changes in your traffic and tell you what caused them. They appear as pulsing exclamation points on your line graph.

Traffic alerts are available in the Core, Plus, and Advanced plans.

Tip: Download the Squarespace app to get notifications when your traffic changes significantly.

How traffic alerts work

Traffic alerts use a machine learning technique called anomaly detection. You might see a spike after sending an Email Marketing campaign, for example, or a dip after you stop using a regular marketing channel.

Anomaly detection compares your current traffic to the previous 28 days. To count as a significant change, your traffic has to fall above or below 99% of that 28-day range.

What do I do about an alert?

An alert tells you which traffic sources drove the change, so you can identify what's working and what isn't. If you're getting less traffic from Facebook than usual, for example, test different social sharing strategies to see which work for your content.

For more on interpreting your results, visit Get help with your analytics results.

Why don’t my numbers match?

Three things commonly explain a difference between what you see in this report and what you'd expect.

Unique visitors higher than visits

Unique visitors is usually lower than visits. On short date ranges it can be higher, because only the first pageview of a browsing session counts toward a visit. If someone arrives just before midnight, that session may count toward the next day's unique visitors but not its visits.

Sessions that cross midnight

We end all browsing sessions at midnight. A late-night visit that crosses midnight ends there, and a second visit registers for the next day.

Do Not Track

If a visitor has Do Not Track enabled, every page they view registers as a new visitor. Pageviews stay accurate, but unique visitors and visits both run high — which can also inflate related figures like direct traffic.

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Track your site traffic