We get lots of questions from clients all the time. One that pops up from time to time is ‘Can I put a number counter or ticket showing the number of visitors to my website?
There’s lots of variations to this question and 9 out of 10 times the answer should be, please do not do that.
That 10th out of 10 times, there’s two ways that things can be done better. Usually, we need to better understand a client’s goal.
Lots of visitors to a site used to convey trust in the site or a site’s success. If you are old enough or remember the internet back in 1999, then you know this.
The thing is that stopped working soon after 1999. It hasn’t come back.
In 2020, if you really want to show your stats, then you need to have a trusted source for stats first. That generally means that you will need Google Analytics setup and running on your site. This system does not display its information to external visitors to your website and there are many reasons why that is a good thing. Even if it were possible, it would probably be illegal in many parts of the world to share data about your other visitors without their permission.
There’s a fine line between helping people gain trust in your site and giving away your valuable data or your visitor’s data.
So with all of that in mind, here’s some guidance on sharing stats to the world. We urge a whole lot of caution with this. Our recommendations below regarding Media Kits would be the method that we recommend the most. These are almost never a live display of data. It requires some type of picture or screenshot. Often time these stats are rolled into a polished infographic or pdf. When it comes to your stats, you do want to control how this information is presented. Locking it down in a PDF is a good thing.
There are many scenarios and types of companies or people that might need a Media Kit, here are a few:
School of Podcastings Guide to Podcasting Media Kits
Izea’s Guide to creating a Media Kit for Influencers
We have been building sites with Divi for the last 4 years. There are lots of ways to create modules and widgets and components that might be used in an infographic right in the Divi Theme itself. We’ve done some of these on client’s websites over the years(Quest For You Example on each episode page). This is not the same as creating a Media Kit and Elegant Theme’s, the creators of Divi, have a blog article on the topic too. The video for their article is below too.
Also, Canva is a great tool for creating a polished looking media kit. You could probably do similar things in any photo manipulation software and you can google make an infographic to find an endless source of options.
Showing those pesky counters
In the end if you really need to show some kind of stats, again, show Google Analytics, something at least trustworthy and reliable and used by millions if not billions of people around the world.
Just don’t expect to display everything.
Here’s one example of a free plugin(Front End Analytics) that might help showcase select Google Analytics stats on the front of a website.