How to check your website traffic for free

Where real traffic numbers come from

There are two kinds of traffic figure, and they are not the same thing. Your own analytics (Search Console, or a script on the page) counts real sessions and is private to you. Third-party estimates for someone else's site are modelled from rankings, click-through curves and public data, and two tools will give you two different numbers. A free traffic checker is only trustworthy when it reads your own data.

That is the line Shipwork draws. It does not show you a made-up visitor count for a competitor, because that number cannot be known from outside. What it can do is read your own Search Console property, with read-only access, and tell you which of your pages already earn clicks and what is wrong on each one.

Connect Search Console

The connection is a standard Google OAuth grant with read-only scope: no script on your site, no change to your theme, nothing to install. Once connected, Shipwork reads your clicks, impressions, average position and the queries behind them, and joins them to the pages they land on. You can disconnect at any time from the same page, and it revokes the access.

What you can check for free

• Traffic at risk: your highest-traffic pages, ranked by the clicks each already earns, with whatever is wrong on them. It orders fixes by the clicks at stake, not by severity in the abstract.
• Your trend: whether clicks and impressions are rising or falling over the window, so you notice a slide before it becomes a cliff.
• Striking distance: the queries you rank for at positions 5 to 20, which are the cheapest wins you have.
• Content gaps and cannibalization: the pages that compete with each other, or miss the query they should own.

Reading the numbers honestly

Three habits keep a traffic report from misleading you. Read clicks first: impressions mean you appeared, clicks mean someone chose you. Treat position as an average, not a rung: a page at "8.4" moves around by query. And compare like with like: a 28-day window against the previous 28 days, not against a single good day. Search Console data also lags two to three days, so the last two days are always incomplete by design.

When the numbers look missing

A new property shows little or nothing for the first weeks: Google has to collect data before there is a trend to read. Pages with no impressions are not necessarily broken; they may simply have not been seen yet. If the connection succeeds but a report is empty, check the date range and the property (the prefix or domain property you connected) before assuming a fault, and use the indexation checks to confirm the pages can be found at all.

Questions

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