Website Traffic Analysis Tools: 10 Best to Track Traffic
Website traffic analysis tools come in two kinds, and most "web traffic analyzer" lists mix them up. Tracking tools (Google Analytics 4, Plausible, Fathom, Simple Analytics, Umami, Matomo, PostHog, Cloudflare Web Analytics, Vercel Web Analytics, Microsoft Clarity, Google Search Console) measure your own site's real visits, because you install a script or verify ownership. Traffic checkers (Similarweb, Semrush, Ahrefs) estimate any website's traffic from outside, using panels, clickstream data and search-ranking models. To analyze website traffic on a site you own, use a tracking tool. To check other website traffic, such as a competitor's, use a checker and treat the number as an estimate.
Below are the best website traffic analysis tools as of November 2026, with prices from each vendor's pricing page, which ones need a cookie banner, how to start tracking web traffic in about 15 minutes, and how to check a website's traffic when it isn't yours.
Two kinds of website traffic tools
| Tracking tools (your site) | Traffic checkers (any site) | |
|---|---|---|
| How they get data | A script on your pages, server logs, or verified ownership | Browser panels, clickstream data, search rankings, models |
| Accuracy | Real counts, minus visitors who block scripts or decline consent | Estimates; can be far off for small sites |
| Detail | Every page, event, source, conversion | Monthly totals, top countries, top sources, top keywords |
| Examples | GA4, Plausible, Fathom, Umami, Matomo, PostHog, Cloudflare, Vercel, Clarity, Search Console | Similarweb, Semrush, Ahrefs |
| Cost | Many are free | Free lookups are limited; full data is paid |
The split matters because the two answer different questions. "How many people visited my pricing page yesterday, and from where?" needs a tracker. "Is my competitor bigger than me, and where does its traffic come from?" needs a checker, because you can't put a script on someone else's site. When you check website analytics for a site you own, never use a checker's estimate as the number you report.
Before you analyze website traffic, the first question is: is it your site? If yes, you want a tracker and you'll get real numbers. If you want to check a website's traffic that belongs to someone else, a traffic analysis website such as Similarweb is the only option, and for analysis, website traffic from a checker is a starting estimate, not a fact. Tools to analyse website traffic free of charge exist on both sides; the table below shows which.
If you only want to know what a number such as "sessions" or "bounce rate" means, read our guide to website visitor statistics. For the basics of how analytics scripts work, see web analytics 101.
What the market actually uses
Google Analytics is on almost half of all websites, and on more than 4 in 5 sites that use any tracker at all. The privacy-first tools are small by comparison: Plausible and PostHog each sit at 0.2% of all websites, and Umami, Fathom and Simple Analytics are below W3Techs' 0.1% reporting line. Popularity isn't quality, but it tells you which tool new hires, agencies and plugins already know.
Percent of all websites W3Techs surveys; a site can use several tools. Umami, Fathom and Simple Analytics are each under 0.1%. Source: W3Techs, traffic analysis tools, 3 November 2026
The 10 best website traffic analysis tools
Prices as of November 2026, from each vendor's pricing page. They change often, so check before you commit. More tracking tools (Fathom, Simple Analytics, Vercel Web Analytics, Microsoft Clarity) follow in the next section, and every tool is in the pricing and privacy table below.
| Tool | Type | Best for | Free option |
|---|---|---|---|
| Google Analytics 4 | Tracking | Full traffic and conversion reporting | Free |
| Google Search Console | Tracking (search only) | Google search clicks, queries, rankings | Free |
| Plausible | Tracking | Simple, cookie-free dashboard | 30-day trial; free self-hosted Community Edition |
| Umami | Tracking | Open-source, self-hosted stats | Free self-hosted; Cloud Hobby plan up to 100K events/month |
| Cloudflare Web Analytics | Tracking | Zero-cost baseline for a blog or docs site | Free |
| Matomo | Tracking | GA-style suite on your own server | On-Premise free |
| PostHog | Tracking | Web plus product analytics and session replay | 1M events/month |
| Similarweb | Checker | Total visits and channel mix for big sites | Limited free site pages |
| Semrush | Checker | Competitor traffic and keyword research | Free account with 10 reports/day |
| Ahrefs | Checker | Organic search traffic estimates | Free traffic checker |
1. Google Analytics 4
GA4 is free and the most complete tracking tool: users, sessions, sources, landing pages, events and conversions, plus links to Google Ads and Search Console. If you want the best website traffic tracker at no cost and you're fine with Google, this is it.
It sets first-party cookies: _ga to distinguish users and _ga_<container-id> to keep session state, both with a 2-year default lifetime (GA4 cookie usage). In the EU and UK that normally means a consent banner, and visitors who decline aren't fully measured. The GA4 help center documents how sessions are counted (30 minutes of inactivity ends one by default).
Two things to change on day one:
- Set data retention to 14 months. Go to Admin > Data collection and modification > Data retention. For standard properties the options are 2 or 14 months; 26, 38 and 50 months are Analytics 360 only (GA4 data retention).
- Mark signups or purchases as key events, so your traffic sources show which ones convert, not just which ones send visits.
The install is one tag in your page <head> (replace the measurement ID with yours from Admin > Data streams):
<script async src="https://www.googletagmanager.com/gtag/js?id=G-XXXXXXXXXX"></script>
<script>
window.dataLayer = window.dataLayer || [];
function gtag(){dataLayer.push(arguments);}
gtag('js', new Date());
gtag('config', 'G-XXXXXXXXXX');
</script>
On WordPress, plugins such as MonsterInsights (on 1.4% of all websites per W3Techs) add this tag and show GA reports inside the WordPress admin. The data is still GA4's.
2. Google Search Console
Search Console is the only free source of Google's own search data: clicks, impressions, click-through rate and average position, per query and per page, for up to 16 months. The Performance report opens on the last three months by default (Search Console help). It doesn't measure visits from other sources, so pair it with one of the tools above.
If you search for a "Google website traffic checker", this and GA4 are what Google offers, and both only work for sites you own or have been given access to. To check website traffic source data for search specifically (which queries bring people in), Search Console is more accurate than any third-party estimate.
3. Plausible
Plausible is a one-page, cookie-free dashboard: visitors, pages, sources, countries, devices and goals. Cloud plans are Starter $9/month, Growth $14/month and Business $19/month at 10k monthly pageviews, with a 30-day free trial and no card required (Plausible pricing). Instead of cookies, it counts unique visitors with hash(daily_salt + website_domain + ip_address + user_agent), and the salt is rotated and deleted every 24 hours, so the same person can't be recognized across days (Plausible data policy). It doesn't use cookies, browser cache or local storage. The Community Edition is free to self-host. Weighing it against GA? See Google Analytics vs Plausible.
4. Umami
Umami is open source, simple and free to self-host (a Node.js app plus PostgreSQL 12.14 or later, per the Umami FAQ). Its tracker doesn't use cookies. Umami Cloud plans (Umami pricing):
- Hobby: $0, 100K events a month, 1 website, 6 months of data.
- Pro: $20/month, 1M events, up to 20 websites, 2 years of data, $0.00003 per extra event.
- Business: $200/month, 10M events, 5 years of data, 5,000 session replays included.
Cloud adds email reports and a streaming API that self-hosted Umami lacks. DevHunt has a Plausible vs Umami comparison.
5. Cloudflare Web Analytics
Free, and you don't need to move DNS or proxy traffic through Cloudflare; you just add a JavaScript beacon (Cloudflare docs). Cloudflare says it doesn't collect visitors' personal data. You get pageviews, visits, referrers, countries, devices and Core Web Vitals, but no custom events or funnels. It's the fastest way to start tracking website hits on a side project.
Know the limits before you rely on it (Cloudflare Web Analytics FAQ): a soft limit of 10 sites per account (support can raise it), six months of history, and unsampled data only for the last 7 days. After that, data is aggregated to around 10% and the dashboard samples dynamically. Fine for trends; not for exact counts on a quiet page.
6. Matomo
Matomo is the closest open-source match to the old Universal Analytics: goals, ecommerce, segments, a tag manager, heatmaps as add-ons. Matomo On-Premise (Community) is free and unlimited if you run the server. Matomo Cloud starts at $26/month (excluding tax) for 50,000 hits a month, with a free 21-day trial (Matomo pricing).
It sets cookies by default but can run without them. Matomo's own guide to running without a consent banner lists the conditions: disable cookies, anonymize IPs by at least 2 bytes, anonymize referrers, keep personal data out of URLs and events, and offer an opt-out (Matomo FAQ).
7. PostHog
PostHog combines web analytics with product analytics, session replay, feature flags and A/B tests. The free tier covers the first 1,000,000 events and 5,000 recordings per month; events 1M to 2M then cost $0.00005 each. Web analytics has no separate price: it runs on the same events. Pick it if you run a product and want traffic and in-app behavior in one place, not just a marketing site dashboard.
PostHog stores a cookie by default, and offers a cookieless_mode option if you want to skip the banner (PostHog cookieless tracking).
8. Similarweb
Similarweb is the best-known traffic checker for other people's sites. Its free website pages show estimated traffic volume, traffic sources, trends and top keywords for a domain; deeper data needs a trial or a paid plan, with Web Intelligence plans from $125/month (Similarweb pricing). It also sells App Intelligence if you need an app traffic checker rather than a website one.
Similarweb says its data blends four sources: first-party analytics shared by site owners, a contributor network of devices running Similarweb products, public data, and partner data from ISPs and measurement firms (Similarweb data sources). It publishes no error rates or minimum-traffic thresholds, and coverage of low-traffic sites is thin.
9. Semrush
Semrush's free website traffic checker estimates monthly visits, unique visitors, engagement, organic and paid traffic, and top pages for any domain or URL. You can use it once a day without an account. A free account allows 10 reports per day across its core tools (Semrush plan comparison).
Paid plans in the US start at $139/month for the SEO plan, or $117.33/month billed annually (Semrush pricing). The full competitor traffic reports live in the separately sold Traffic & Market Toolkit, so check whether your plan includes it. Semrush says its estimates come from aggregated browsing patterns, search activity and partner data. It's most useful when you also want the keyword and backlink data in the same tool.
10. Ahrefs
The Ahrefs traffic checker estimates organic search traffic for any domain or URL, modeled from the keywords the site ranks for in Ahrefs' index. It doesn't estimate direct, social or referral visits, so treat it as "organic search traffic", not total traffic. Paid plans start at $29/month (Starter) and $129/month (Lite) (Ahrefs pricing).
Ahrefs also runs a tracker for your own site: Ahrefs Web Analytics is free for verified sites up to 1 million events per project per month, uses no cookies and loads a 2 KB script. W3Techs already finds it on 0.4% of all websites. More SEO-side tools are in DevHunt's SEO category.
More tools to track website traffic: Fathom, Simple Analytics, Vercel, Clarity
These four didn't fit the original top 10 but are often the better pick for a specific setup.
Fathom Analytics
Fathom is a hosted, cookie-free tracker in the same family as Plausible, with a different pricing shape: $15/month covers up to 100,000 pageviews and at least 50 sites, then $25 for 200,000, $45 for 500,000 and $60 for 1,000,000. Pageviews and custom events share the allowance. Every plan says "No cookie banners required." The trial is 7 days and needs a card. Good for agencies or anyone with many small sites, since sites are not the unit of billing.
Simple Analytics
Simple Analytics is a Dutch, cookie-free tracker. It has a genuinely free plan for hobby sites: 5 websites, 1 user, 30 days of history and a required badge. The self-serve plan is $20/month for 100k pageviews, with a 14-day trial and no card. Its pricing page states "No cookies, no consent banners, no personal data." It also offers a 30-day proof of concept that runs alongside GA4, which is a sensible way to compare numbers before you switch.
Vercel Web Analytics
If your site is deployed on Vercel, Web Analytics is one package and one component away. Hobby includes 50,000 events a month with a 1-month reporting window; collection pauses if you go over. Pro pays $0.03 per 1K events with a 12-month window and custom events, and the Web Analytics Plus add-on ($10/month per team) extends it to 24 months and adds UTM parameters. Vercel says it uses no third-party cookies and identifies visitors with a hash of the request that is discarded after 24 hours (Vercel privacy docs).
npm i @vercel/analytics
// app/layout.tsx
import { Analytics } from '@vercel/analytics/next';
export default function RootLayout({ children }: { children: React.ReactNode }) {
return (
<html lang="en">
<body>
{children}
<Analytics />
</body>
</html>
);
}
Then enable Web Analytics in the project's dashboard and deploy.
Microsoft Clarity
Microsoft Clarity is free with no traffic limits, no sampling and unlimited sites. It's not a traffic counter first: it records sessions and builds heatmaps so you can see why visitors leave, and it's now on 4.2% of all websites per W3Techs. Recordings are kept for 30 days. It uses first-party cookies, and Microsoft requires an explicit consent signal for visitors in the EEA, UK and Switzerland. Without consent, Clarity still counts page views but splits each visit into separate sessions and drops full replays. Pair it with a counter like GA4 or Plausible rather than using it alone.
Pricing and privacy compared (November 2026)
All prices are USD per month from each vendor's pricing page, fetched in November 2026. "Banner" means whether the tool, as the vendor documents it, sets cookies that typically require consent from EU and UK visitors. Whether your site needs a banner also depends on everything else you load, so treat this column as a starting point, not legal advice.
| Tool | Free option | Paid from | Cookies and consent banner |
|---|---|---|---|
| Google Analytics 4 | Free | Analytics 360 (enterprise, quoted) | Sets _ga cookies for 2 years; banner normally needed in EU/UK |
| Google Search Console | Free | None | No script on your site |
| Plausible | 30-day trial; Community Edition self-hosted | $9 (10k pageviews) | No cookies; vendor says no banner needed |
| Fathom | 7-day trial (card required) | $15 (100k pageviews, 50 sites) | No cookies; "no cookie banners required" |
| Simple Analytics | Free for hobby sites (5 sites, 30 days history) | $20 (100k pageviews) | No cookies, no banner (vendor) |
| Umami | Hobby: 100K events, 1 site; self-hosted free | $20 (1M events) | Tracker uses no cookies |
| Matomo | On-Premise free | $26 Cloud (50,000 hits) | Cookies by default; can be configured cookieless |
| PostHog | 1M events + 5,000 recordings | $0.00005/event after 1M | Cookie by default; cookieless_mode available |
| Cloudflare Web Analytics | Free (10 sites soft limit) | None | Cloudflare says no personal data collected |
| Vercel Web Analytics | Hobby: 50,000 events | $0.03 per 1K events (Pro) | No third-party cookies; 24-hour request hash |
| Microsoft Clarity | Free, no limits | None | First-party cookies; explicit consent required in EEA/UK/CH |
| Ahrefs Web Analytics | Free up to 1M events per project | Included with Ahrefs Free | No cookies |
| Similarweb (checker) | High-level free site data | $125 (Web Intelligence) | Not on your site |
| Semrush (checker) | 1 lookup/day without account; 10 reports/day free | $139 ($117.33 billed yearly) | Not on your site |
| Ahrefs (checker) | Free traffic checker | $29 (Starter) | Not on your site |
Allowances differ: Plausible 10k pageviews, Fathom 100k, Simple Analytics 100k, Umami Pro 1M events, Matomo Cloud 50k hits. Semrush is the monthly-billed SEO plan. GA4, Cloudflare and Clarity are free. Source: Vendor pricing pages, November 2026
Which website traffic tool should you pick?
Browse more analytics tools on DevHunt, or see our list of web analytics tools for developers.
How to start tracking web traffic in 15 minutes
The quickest zero-cost setup for a site you own, using Cloudflare Web Analytics plus Search Console:
- In the Cloudflare dashboard, open your account's Web Analytics page, select Add a site, enter your hostname, then open Manage site and copy the JS snippet (Cloudflare setup guide). You need a free Cloudflare account, not Cloudflare DNS.
- Paste the snippet just before
</body>on every page (in a Next.js app, the root layout):
<script defer src="https://static.cloudflareinsights.com/beacon.min.js"
data-cf-beacon='{"token": "YOUR_SITE_TOKEN"}'></script>
- Load your site in a browser without an ad blocker and check that the visit appears in the dashboard.
- Add the site to Search Console (a DNS TXT record verifies the whole domain) and submit your sitemap.
- When you need conversions or funnels, move up to GA4, Plausible or PostHog. Run the old and new tool side by side for a few weeks and compare trends, not totals.
Tracking website hits from server logs
Script-based tools miss visitors who block JavaScript trackers, which on developer-focused sites can be a large share. Your web server's access log sees every request. GoAccess is a free, open-source log analyzer that turns a standard log into an HTML report:
goaccess /var/log/nginx/access.log --log-format=COMBINED -o report.html
Logs count bots and every asset request too, so their "hits" are much higher than real pageviews. Use them as a cross-check, not a replacement. If you only need daily totals, you can also check website hits per day with a one-liner that counts successful HTML page requests by date:
awk '$9 == 200 && $7 !~ /\.(js|css|png|jpg|svg|ico|woff2?)$/ {split($4, d, ":"); print substr(d[1], 2)}' \
/var/log/nginx/access.log | sort | uniq -c
To filter out crawlers, look up unfamiliar user agents with DevHunt's user agent parser.
Check and analyze website traffic with an API
If you want traffic numbers in your own dashboard, a Slack alert or an automated website traffic report, pull them from the tracker's API instead of copying from the UI:
- GA4: the Google Analytics Data API (
runReport) returns any dimension and metric you see in reports. - Search Console: the Search Analytics API returns queries, pages, clicks and impressions for the same 16-month window as the UI.
- Plausible: the Stats API returns visitors, pageviews and breakdowns per site.
- Vercel: Web Analytics has a query API for custom reports.
A minimal GA4 example in Node.js, with a service account that has Viewer access to the property:
// npm i @google-analytics/data
import { BetaAnalyticsDataClient } from '@google-analytics/data';
const client = new BetaAnalyticsDataClient(); // uses GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS
const [report] = await client.runReport({
property: 'properties/123456789',
dateRanges: [{ startDate: '28daysAgo', endDate: 'yesterday' }],
dimensions: [{ name: 'sessionSource' }],
metrics: [{ name: 'sessions' }, { name: 'activeUsers' }],
orderBys: [{ metric: { metricName: 'sessions' }, desc: true }],
limit: 10,
});
for (const row of report.rows ?? []) {
console.log(row.dimensionValues[0].value, row.metricValues[0].value);
}
How to check any website's traffic (competitors included)
You can't see another site's real analytics unless its owner shares them. What you can do is collect estimates from tools that model traffic differently and see where they agree. This is how to check competitor website traffic free of charge, and how to check how much traffic a website gets without fooling yourself. To check traffic, competitors' website estimates from at least two tools beat one number from one tool.
- Start with Similarweb for total visits. Enter the domain at similarweb.com/website. Note the monthly visits, the trend and the traffic source split (direct, search, social, referral). This is the only one of the three that tries to estimate all channels.
- Check search traffic in Ahrefs and Semrush. Run the same domain through the Ahrefs traffic checker and the Semrush traffic checker. Both estimate organic search visits from ranking keywords, and both show the top pages and keywords behind that traffic, which is often more useful than the total.
- Compare the numbers, not the tools. If Similarweb's "search" share and the Ahrefs organic estimate are in the same range, you can trust the order of magnitude. If they differ by several times, the site is probably too small for either model.
- Calibrate against a site you own. Look up your own domain in each checker and compare it with your real GA4 or Plausible numbers. If a checker shows half your real traffic, assume it undercounts sites like yours by about that much.
- Look for public signals. Some sites publish traffic in a media kit, an advertising page, a public analytics dashboard or investor updates. Those beat any estimate.
- Track the trend over months. One snapshot is noisy. A competitor whose estimated visits rise for six months in a row is growing, whatever the exact figure.
Estimates vs real data: what each source can tell you
| Question | Your own tracker | Search Console | Similarweb | Semrush / Ahrefs |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Exact visits yesterday | Yes | No (search only) | No | No |
| Daily visitors of a website you don't own | No | No | Estimate (monthly) | Organic only, monthly |
| Traffic source split | Yes | Google search only | Estimate | Search only (organic, plus paid in Semrush) |
| Which search queries bring visits | Partly (GA4 hides most) | Yes, real data | Estimate | Estimate |
| Conversions and revenue | Yes | No | No | No |
| Works for small sites | Yes | Yes | Often no data | Only if it ranks |
Website analysis tools: speed and page checks
People searching for a "webpage analyzer" or a "developer speed test" usually want page quality, not traffic. Two free Google tools cover it:
- PageSpeed Insights: enter a URL to get Core Web Vitals from real Chrome users over the last 28 days (if the site has enough traffic) plus a Lighthouse lab test with suggested fixes.
- Lighthouse in Chrome DevTools: open DevTools, choose the Lighthouse panel, pick mobile or desktop and run it locally for performance, accessibility, SEO and best-practice audits. Good for testing a page before it's deployed.
Cloudflare Web Analytics and Vercel (with its separate Speed Insights product) also report Core Web Vitals from your own visitors, so you can watch page speed in the same place you track website traffic. For the meta tags that decide how your pages look in search and social, use DevHunt's meta tag generator.
Using traffic data to grow traffic
Tracking only pays off if it changes what you do. Five checks that usually lead somewhere:
- Tag every link you share with UTM parameters (
utm_source,utm_medium,utm_campaign) so newsletter, social and community posts show up as separate sources instead of "direct". For examplehttps://example.com/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nov-launch. Check a tagged link with DevHunt's URL parser, which decodes UTM tags. - In Search Console, sort queries by impressions and look for low CTR. Pages that rank but don't get clicked often need a better title and meta description.
- Look at top referrers. If one site sends steady traffic, it's worth a relationship, a guest post or a listing. AI assistants now show up here too (look for referrers like chatgpt.com or perplexity.ai), so check whether they send visits to your docs or pricing page.
- Compare landing pages by conversion, not just visits. A page with half the traffic but three times the signups deserves more promotion.
- Watch a competitor's top pages in Ahrefs or Semrush. The pages that bring them search traffic are a list of topics your audience already searches for.
Limitations
- Every client-side tool undercounts. Ad blockers and declined consent hide part of your audience. Server logs and cookie-free tools close some of the gap, not all of it.
- Tools don't agree. GA4, Plausible and Cloudflare define visitors and sessions differently, and Cloudflare samples older data. Pick one source of truth and report from it.
- Free tiers have edges. Cloudflare keeps six months, Vercel Hobby keeps one month and pauses at 50,000 events, Umami Hobby keeps six months, Simple Analytics' free plan keeps 30 days.
- Traffic checkers are models. Use them to compare sites of similar size or to spot trends, not to quote exact numbers. For a site with a few thousand visits a month, estimates can be off by a wide margin or missing entirely.
For a deeper side-by-side on pricing and privacy, see our web analytics services comparison, or browse analytics tools on DevHunt and free Google Analytics alternatives.
FAQ
How can I check my website traffic for free?
Install Google Analytics 4, Cloudflare Web Analytics, or a self-hosted Umami or Matomo; all are free. Simple Analytics, Umami Cloud Hobby, Vercel Hobby and Ahrefs Web Analytics also have free plans with limits. Add Google Search Console for search clicks and queries. Your hosting provider's server logs are another free source.
Can I see how much traffic another website gets?
Only as an estimate. Similarweb, Semrush and Ahrefs offer free lookups with limits. Similarweb shows estimated total visits; Ahrefs estimates organic search traffic only. Exact numbers come only from the site owner.
How do I check competitor website traffic for free?
Look the domain up in Similarweb's free website pages for total visits and sources, then in the Ahrefs and Semrush traffic checkers for search traffic and top pages. Semrush allows one lookup a day without an account. Compare all three, and calibrate them by looking up your own site.
What is the best web traffic analyzer?
For your own site, GA4 is the most complete free option, and Plausible, Fathom or Umami are the simplest privacy-friendly ones. For other sites, Similarweb gives the broadest estimate of total traffic, and Semrush or Ahrefs are better for search traffic.
What is the best website traffic estimator?
Similarweb, because it is the only major checker that estimates every channel (direct, search, social, referral) rather than search alone. For organic search traffic, Ahrefs and Semrush are usually closer, since they model it from rankings they track directly.
Is there a Google website traffic checker?
Google doesn't offer a tool to check other sites' traffic. Google Analytics and Search Console only show data for websites you own or have been given access to.
How accurate are website traffic checkers?
They're modeled estimates, and none of the major vendors publishes error rates. They tend to be closer for large sites and less reliable for small ones. Compare several tools and look at trends rather than single numbers.
Can I check daily visitors of a website I don't own?
Not reliably. Checkers report monthly estimates, and splitting those into days only spreads the error. Daily visitor counts exist only in the owner's own analytics.
How do I check website hits online?
For your own site, open your tracker's dashboard (GA4, Plausible, Cloudflare and others show live or daily views) or run your server log through GoAccess. For another site, "hits" aren't public; use Similarweb or Semrush for an estimated monthly visit count.
Do I need a cookie banner for website analytics?
It depends on the tool. GA4 and Microsoft Clarity set cookies, so EU and UK visitors normally need to consent. Plausible, Fathom, Simple Analytics and Umami don't use cookies and say no banner is needed for their analytics; Matomo and PostHog can be configured to run cookie-free.
Which free tool shows where my website traffic comes from?
GA4 has the most detailed source and channel reports for free. Plausible, Umami, Cloudflare and Vercel all show top referrers too. Add UTM tags to links you share so campaigns show up as their own sources.