How to Check Website Traffic for Any Site (8 Best Tools)
Do you want to check website traffic for any site, including your own?
Checking website traffic allows you to see how well your site performs and how it compares to your competition.
In this article, we’ll show you how to check website traffic for any website using various online tools.
Rank | Tool Name | Pricing |
---|---|---|
🥇 | Semrush | Starts at $129/month; Free limited version |
🥈 | SimilarWeb | Free basic version; Enterprise custom pricing |
🥉 | Google Search Console | Free |
4 | SEO PowerSuite | Free basic; Paid plans start at $299/year |
5 | Ubersuggest | Free basic; Premium plans from $29/month |
6 | Serpstat | Starts at $50/month; Free limited version |
7 | Ahrefs | Starts at $129/month if paid annually |
8 | MonsterInsights | Free basic; Paid plans start at $99 per year |
Why Should You Check Your Website Traffic?
By checking your website stats, you can easily see how your website is performing.
Your website traffic data will show you where your traffic is coming from, how visitors engage with your site, and what digital marketing strategies are working.
If you want to get more email subscribers, more sales for your online store, or just more traffic overall, then you need to regularly check your website analytics.
By tracking your site’s traffic, you’ll know where your site currently stands and what you can do to improve.
Why Should You Check Your Competitor’s Website Traffic?
Analyzing your competitor’s website traffic statistics can reveal a lot of helpful information, such as:
- The pages and posts bringing your competitors the most traffic
- Which keywords your competitors rank for
- The channels that are driving them the most traffic
All of this information can be used to improve your content marketing strategy, link building, keyword research process, and more.
By understanding what brings your competition the most traffic, you’ll be able to target those same keywords and topics to generate more traffic for your website.
Best Tools to Check Any Website Traffic (including Competitors)
There are a lot of free and paid traffic-checking tools that you can use. Each one has unique features that set them apart.
Most experts use multiple tools to check website traffic estimates for their competitors. We always recommend readers try at least two different tools to analyze web traffic stats.
We have tested each and every one of the tools below, and we are confident in recommending that you try any or all of them.
By using various tools, you’ll be able to fill in the gaps and get more accurate traffic stats for any website.
As your WordPress site and budget grow, you can invest in multiple tools to gain more insights and dominate your market.
Having said that, let’s take a look at the best tools to check how much traffic a website gets.
1. Semrush
Semrush is an all-in-one traffic analysis and competition research tool. It’s the best tool for analyzing and monitoring traffic for any website.
We use this tool at WPBeginner for keyword research, tracking keyword rankings, and a lot more.
Once you enter a competitor URL, you’ll get a detailed breakdown of your competitor’s total traffic.
You’ll be able to see important website metrics like the volume of monthly traffic over time, traffic distribution by country, the keywords that bring them the most traffic, and more.
The Traffic Analytics tab gives you the number of unique visitors, total visits, average visit duration, number of pageviews, and the bounce rate the site receives.
This feature is like looking into your competitor’s Google Analytics account.
Another excellent feature called Bulk Traffic Analysis lets you analyze traffic levels for multiple competitors at once.
Depending on your pricing plan, you can compare up to 200 websites. This gives you a big-picture view of your niche, the websites getting the most traffic, and any traffic opportunities you can act on.
You’ll also find detailed traffic analytics reports that give you information like which sites are sending the most referral traffic, which pages on their site are the most valuable, and which locations bring them the most traffic.
You can use our Semrush coupon code to take advantage of the free premium trial, or the free (but limited) plan, which gives you access to basic website data.
If you want full reports, then the premium plans start at $129 per month, which gives you full access to competitor traffic sources, rankings, social media, and more.
FreeAlternative: If you simply want to get an idea of the keywords that your competitors are targeting, you can use WPBeginner’s free Keyword Density Checker.
2. SimilarWeb
SimilarWeb is an online website traffic checker that gives you an overview of your competitor’s traffic and which channels are the most valuable.
Instead of just providing traffic from search, you’ll get detailed reports of a website’s entire traffic strategy.
Once you run a website through the tool, you’ll get a breakdown of the overall traffic, including a country-by-country report.
You’ll get engagement metrics like bounce rate, number of pages viewed per visit, average visit duration, and the top traffic sources for that website.
Beyond organic search traffic, you’ll find what paid keywords bring the website traffic, what social channels are the most valuable, and the display networks the site uses to monetize.
Finally, you’ll get a detailed breakdown of the site’s audience, what kind of other sites they’re interested in, the top referring sites, and a list of competitor sites for you to research further.
The free version of the tool provides you with useful traffic data. If you require more detailed reports, then you can create an enterprise account with custom pricing.
3. Google Search Console
Google Search Console is a free tool from Google that lets you analyze your search engine traffic.
This tool gives you a complete picture of how your site is viewed by search engines.
It shows the number of impressions, clicks, click-through rate (CTR), and the average position of your keywords in the search engines.
This helps you understand what keywords you’re ranking for and the search volume they’re bringing in. This information can help you improve your traffic.
For example, if you find that you’re ranking in position 11, then you can optimize the blog post to try to move it to the first page of the search results.
You can also see which pages are indexed, if any errors are present, and more.
Once you add your site to Google Search Console, you can start viewing your website data.
The easiest way to connect your Google Search Console account is by using All in One SEO (AIOSEO). For more details, see our guide on how to add your WordPress site to Google Search Console.
AIOSEO also comes with a Search Statistics addon that lets you view data from Google Search Console right from your WordPress dashboard.
That way, you can view SEO statistics, track keyword rankings, discover your top-performing content, and more, without leaving your site.
As an alternative, you can use the MonsterInsights tool, mentioned below, to view your keyword rankings inside the WordPress admin area using Google Search Console data.
For more details, see our guide on how to see keywords people use to find your WordPress site.
4. SEO PowerSuite
SEO PowerSuite is a suite of desktop apps that includes Rank Tracker, Website Auditor, SEO Spyglass, and LinkAssistant. It’s been over 19 years on the market, so the chances are high that you used this tool.
To quickly check traffic stats, there is Rank Tracker, which provides mainly keyword research and rank-tracking functionality.
Under the Domain Analysis tab, you’ll see a data-rich dashboard with multiple graphs and charts. By default, this dashboard shows information about the project domain. Still, you can enter any URL to check organic traffic, keywords, the number of backlinks, and domain strength (SEO PowerSuite’s alternative to PageRank).
If you’d rather start your research with a keyword than a URL, you can do that in the SERP analysis module. The software will crawl the SERP and provide insights for the top 50 results, including organic traffic, backlinks, keyword difficulty, and more.
The handy option here is that you can change the preferred search engine, either for a local version of Google or for Bing, Yahoo, and even YouTube.
There are many other features in Rank Tracker, including dozens of keyword research methods (with the rare TF-IDF option), the competitor research dashboard (to check for the keyword gap and competitor’s top content), and, of course, a rank-tracking dashboard to monitor your progress alongside the competition.
You can use most features in Rank Tracker for free, but if you need to save and share the project data (locally or to the cloud), you’ll need a paid plan starting from $299/year.
5. Ubersuggest
Ubersuggest is a free and premium tool from Neil Patel that offers a ton of useful website traffic data.
It’s straightforward to use and the interface is built for beginners. If you’ve never done keyword research or traffic analysis before, then this tool makes it incredibly simple.
The traffic analyzer feature gives you a detailed breakdown of your competitor’s traffic over time, the keywords bringing them the most traffic, and the most popular pages on the site.
All you have to do is enter the website URL you want to analyze and click ‘Search.’
The ‘Traffic Overview’ page gives you the total number of organic keywords the site ranks for, the organic monthly traffic, domain authority, and the total number of backlinks.
You can also dive deeper into each section of the traffic report. For example, you can expand the ‘Top Pages’ results to get a breakdown of each published page on the site and the estimated amount of traffic it brings in every month.
The results also give you the estimated number of backlinks, along with the number of Facebook and Pinterest shares. This data gives you a general overview of what you’ll have to do to outrank that page in the SERPs.
The free version of the tool gives you access to the last 3 months of data. Premium plans start at $29 per month, making it one of the cheapest tools on this list.
6. Serpstat
Serpstat offers a wide range of different SEO tools. What started as a simple keyword research tool has grown into an all-in-one website analysis tool.
Even though it’s packed with features, it’s still very easy to use. Just enter the URL and the tool will generate a traffic report.
There are traffic-checking features along with backlink analysis, site auditing, and rank-tracking tools.
The traffic analysis features give you all kinds of useful website data, including the organic and paid keywords that are driving traffic, the average number of visitors the site gets per month, and the pages that get the most traffic.
You’ll also find trend information so you can see how the site’s rankings, traffic, and keywords are performing over time.
The free version of the tool gives you access to a portion of the total data that’s available for a domain name. Premium plans start at $50 per month and give you access to all of the data the tool provides.
7. Ahrefs
Ahrefs is one of the most popular SEO tools in the market, trusted by brands like Netflix, Uber, and Facebook. It helps you see how much traffic your competition is getting and why they’re ranking so high.
Ahrefs crawls more than 6 billion web pages every day, with more than 200 million websites in their index. It’s a lot of data, but this gives you actionable insights to help you outrank your competitors and get more traffic.
The interface is very simple and user-friendly. Simply enter the website URL in the search field and the tool will pull all available website information.
The search overview report gives you an overview of the organic search traffic a site receives, the domain authority, the biggest competitors, and much more.
You can filter the report to view the traffic stats for the year, the last 30 days, or all time.
Even though there’s a ton of data present, it’s easy to filter and find the website metrics you’re looking for.
Keep in mind that the traffic data only shows organic search data and not other sources like social media.
There’s a free membership to the Ahrefs webmaster tools, but for the full suite, plans start at $129 per month if paid annually. Considering the amount of data you have access to, our experience shows that it’s worth the cost.
8. MonsterInsights
If you want to analyze your own traffic, then the only tool you should be using is Google Analytics. However, setting up Google Analytics on your own and analyzing your own data can be difficult.
We recommend using MonsterInsights, it’s the best Google Analytics plugin for WordPress and is used by over 3 million sites, including Microsoft, Yelp, PlayStation, and more.
It allows you to easily set up Google Analytics in WordPress and view your traffic data directly in your WordPress dashboard.
Plus, you can add annotations directly to your MonsterInsights reports each time you make key changes to your website.
That way, when you publish a new blog post, run an ad campaign, or send an email newsletter, you can easily track how those events impact your traffic.
After using the tools above to track your competitors’ traffic and keywords, this is the perfect way to analyze whether their strategies are working for your own website.
You’ll also be able to see your top-performing posts, pages, landing pages, homepage traffic, visitor demographics, and more. This helps you understand user behavior and makes it much easier to grow your WordPress blog.
Final Thoughts on How to Check Traffic on Your Website
There are all kinds of tools you can use to check your website traffic and competitor website traffic.
Checking competitor traffic will give you insights into your market and what you can do to get more traffic. While, monitoring your own website traffic will show you if your SEO, social media, and other traffic generation strategies are working.
The best way to check your own website traffic is with MonsterInsights. With a couple of clicks, you can view your website traffic data directly in your WordPress dashboard.
If you want to see your website’s SEO traffic, then AIOSEO will show you all your search traffic stats right inside WordPress.
If your goal is to do in-depth competitor research, and you want to check traffic on any website, then Semrush is our top choice. Not only will it give you accurate traffic data, but it’s one of the best SEO tools in the market.
We hope this article helps you learn how to check website traffic on any site. You may also want to take a look at our ultimate WordPress SEO guide, and our expert list of 24 must-have WordPress plugins for business websites.
If you liked this article, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.