Live Visitors

The Live view shows who is on your website right now. It refreshes every 30 seconds.

What the count includes

A visitor is counted as live if either is true:

• their browser has checked in within the last half minute — this happens automatically every 30 seconds while the tab is open, so someone reading a long page without clicking still counts
• they loaded a page in the last 90 seconds

The two overlap but neither covers the other. A visitor who arrived a moment ago has not checked in yet; a visitor who has been reading quietly for ten minutes has not loaded a page recently. Counting both is what stops the number flickering.

The recent list

Below the count you get the twenty most recent page views. Each one shows:

• the page they landed on
• the country and, where it can be worked out, the city
• the source — direct, or the website that sent them

Twenty is a fixed number, not a time window. On a busy site that covers the last few minutes. On a quiet one the oldest entries may be hours old, so read the list as "the last twenty things that happened" rather than "what happened recently".

The globe

A globe shows roughly where visitors are, at country and city level, with dots at active locations. Location is approximate and worked out from the network connection. It is never tied to a name, an email address, or anything a visitor typed.

Reading the count

Zero is normal. Most websites are empty most of the time. A count of 0 means nobody is browsing this minute, not that tracking is broken — if you want to confirm it works, open your own site in another tab and watch the count rise.

It will not match your daily visitor total. Live counts people in a 90-second window; the daily figure counts everyone across 24 hours. A site with 200 visitors a day is usually showing 0 or 1 live.

It is at its most useful during something. Sending a newsletter, posting a link, running an ad: the Live view tells you within a minute whether anyone is arriving, which no other number on the page can do.

If the count seems stuck

The live count depends on a live connection between your site and Helm. If it stops updating while the rest of Analytics keeps working, the count falls back to page loads alone — so it still works, but a quietly-reading visitor may drop out of it until they load another page. Historical figures are never affected.