Introducing Visitors

After just over a year of building on the side, I'm thrilled to introduce to you all Visitors, yet another privacy-friendly web analytics alternative.

Most people assume I only design since I also run Endless, a design agency. However, I've actually had a very keen interest in development for over a decade.

Over the years, I've worked on many things on the side, most of which just were experiments out of interest, never actually making it into production.

I've always wanted to launch a SaaS, and one the main things I've always wanted to build was a web analytics too. Thus, Visitors was born.

Why another analytics tool?

There are many decent and established privacy-friendly web analytics tools out there already. There's Plausible, Fathom, and even some open-source alternatives. So why make a new one?

Well, I'm a designer at heart. Like many designers, I wanted to put my stamp on things. I wanted to create the most beautiful analytics I could.

Not just that, I felt like there were things I could do differently and improve upon from what already existed. I'll go more into this later.

I've spent the past year redesigning Visitors more times than you can imagine. In fact, just 2 weeks before we launched, it was a dark, monochromatic design.

I suffer with a self-sabotaging desire for perfection, so naturally I completely changed that design into what you see below.

Honestly, I probably could have launched this early 2025 if I didn't value the work I put out so much, but I'm truly happy with how it looks and feels today, and that's what matters.

Realtime that's actually realtime

This might come as a surprise, but a lot of web analytics services aren't actually realtime. They show you delayed data, which could be anywhere from 10 seconds to days.

Visitors utilizes websockets, which means that as soon as we know a visitor has landed on your site, you will too. This all happens in less than a second.

One thing I always found web analytics services fell short on was their realtime experience. Most of them just showed you how many were online, which doesn't really excite me as a user.

So we built a globe to create a sense of things happening. There's just something different about seeing what real visitors are up to on your website at any given time.

There are some challenges to this of course, given that we are privacy-friendly, we don't actually store or expose a visitor's real longitude and latitude.

Locations are normalized to city center and use a subtle scattering algorithm to avoid stacking of profiles.

So launch that blog post, post than link on X and observe as new visitors pop up from all over the globe.

Visitors and journeys

Again, a lot of web analytics services just give you numbers, they fall short on giving you the complete picture of how visitors actually interact with your site.

Given we track every single event in the first place, it only makes sense to build a complete journey for each visitor.

So we made profiles and journeys. Every single visitor you have gets a unique profile. It's like a visual snapshot of every visitor's interaction with your site. You can see where they came from, what they're doing, and how long they're staying.

It's extremely powerful and interesting. It gives you insights into what content is most engaging, and what pages are most likely to convert.

Small caveat: Visitors is privacy-friendly by default and the way visitors are anonymized ensures they're not tracked over devices or multiple days. However, you can optionally identify and persist visitors, this will give you a complete journey from the very first time they visit your site, over multiple days or devices.

Performance insights

Performance is often undervalued in web analytics. Most people just care about visitor counts, not visitor experience.

Sure, there are tools like Lighthouse or Page Speed Insights, but they don't paint a full picture of how your site performs for real visitors over time.

Visitors gives you a deep dive into your site's performance by tracking every user's performance while on your site.

We also give your site an Experience Score. We base this on the overall performance of your site across all 5 core web vitals metrics. If you're in the green, you're doing great. If not, don't sweat, we'll tell you exactly what you need to improve, even down to the page.

The future

I have no idea what to expect for Visitors. Whether there's a demand for it, or if it will just blend in amongst the others. I won't be mad if it's the latter, I'll know I've tried my best.

Honestly, I built Visitors because I love building things, and I truly care about the details and user experience. It took me just over a year to build on and off, and I've learned a lot along the way.

If you would like to be a user, you can start your 14 day free trial today.

If you have any feedback or suggestions, reach out as I'd love to hear from you, good or bad.

Your support means a lot.