Reading a site’s traffic

What each number on a site's Analytics page means, and how it's worked out for Plausible and Umami.

Updated Oct 4, 2026

Each site’s Analytics page shows the last 7, 30 or 90 days (pick at the top right), in your timezone, compared with the same length of time just before.

The numbers

Number Meaning
Visitors Different people (unique visitors) in the period.
Visits Sessions. One visitor coming back next week counts as two visits.
Pageviews Pages loaded.
Bounce rate Share of visits that saw one page and left. Lower is usually better, so a drop shows green.
Visit length Average time a visit lasted.

Under each number: the change against the previous period (▲ or ▼ and a percentage). Green means better, orange means worse. “No earlier data” means the previous period had nothing to compare with.

The chart and lists

  • Visitors per day. Hover for that day’s visitors and pageviews. Show as table lists every day.
  • Top pages and Top sources: the ten pages and referrers with the most visitors. “Direct / none” is people who typed the address, used a bookmark, or whose browser didn’t say where they came from.

Each service counts a little differently

Google Analytics Plausible Umami
Visitors Total users Unique visitors Unique visitors
Visitors per day Total users that day Unique visitors that day Visits (sessions) that day
Bounce rate, visit length GA4’s bounce rate (sessions that weren’t engaged) and average session duration As Plausible reports them Worked out from Umami’s bounces and total time, divided by visits
Top pages Users per page path Visitors per page Pageviews per page

GA4’s bounce rate isn’t the old Universal Analytics one: it’s the share of sessions that lasted under 10 seconds, saw one page and had no conversion. Dates follow the GA property’s timezone. So two sites on different services aren’t quite like-for-like. One site over time always is.

Numbers update every 15 minutes at most. If you’ve just added the tracking script to a site, give it a day before the chart means much.

Ask the Foreman: “How’s traffic on Acme Plumbing this month?” or “Which pages got the most visitors last week?”

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