How to See Who Is Following Your WordPress Site

Viewing how many people are following your website, built using WordPress or not, is crucial. Although you shouldn’t make changes based on every visitor observation and request, it’s pivotal that website owners understand their audience. While you can follow guidelines, get advice from others in the niche, or go about it based on feeling, you won’t know what’s working without this information. Furthermore, if you seek to hire a marketing firm, place ads, or have ads placed on your website, providing precise data of this type is mandatory. Finally, seeing an uptick in analytics works wonders for motivation. Let’s demonstrate how to see who is following your WordPress site.

What can I learn about people following my WordPress website?

The type of information you can learn about users who follow your site on WordPress may include:

• A total of visitors that are following your website across several mediums
• The visitor curve that represents the highs and lows of your site visits and when date and time when people followed
• Followers’ IP address, browser, and operating system, and thus location in the world and categorization based on countries
• Pages that were visited the most and least

As you can see, this data can help you boost your traffic, optimize your website, satisfy your user base, and ultimately bring you more money to reinvest. You’ll also know whether there’s a demand for new features, content change, or even rebranding. However, bits of information you choose to collect and store must be mentioned in your site’s Privacy Policy and Terms of Service. Moreover, data-related practices must fit laws on multiple levels. For instance, GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) is part of the European Union law. Though restrictive, you must respect it for visitors that come from countries it applies to.

See the visitors following your WordPress.com site

Since WordPress needs to cater to all kinds of users, it needs to remain lightweight. Thus, it lacks advanced analytics functionality that some website owners may find unnecessary. However, that only applies to WordPress.org, i.e., the self-hosted version. People who decide to host a site via WordPress.com (see who owns WordPress for an explanation) have a way to see detailed stats. Follow these steps to see WordPress.com site analytics as an owner:

1. Visit the WordPress.com site admin dashboard, then click on Stats on the left-hand side.
2. Preview the Traffic and Insights tabs to see general information about people who clicked the Follow button on your blog. A key section is the one titled “Follower totals”.
   Note. The aforementioned button only becomes available when you publish two or more posts.
3. Navigate to the Users tab in the left sidebar. You’ll now see a breakdown of followers on your website split into 4 tabs:
   1. Team — An assortment of users that have a certain user role, such as Writer, Administrator, Editor, and so on.
   2. Followers — Shows a list that followed your website using their account for WordPress.com.
   3. Email Followers — Self-explanatory; followers that signed up for site updates with their e-mail, on a dedicated page, or by clicking on a “Subscribe” block you placed. You may notice some duplicates, as one user may have also used the method above. Most importantly, you can click on “Download Data as CSV” to view the list offline or import it to other software.
   4. Invites — A variety of users you either invited to follow your website or requested they join, so you can assign a user role.

Check the stats of your email or newsletters plugin for WordPress

Continuing with things WordPress supports innately, we need to mention newsletter functions. While far from advanced and with no way to see the number like above, we ought to remind you that WordPress.com integrates:

• Mailchimp inside Form blocks — You can use the mailing service to create a newsletter sign-up or a contact form. Any responses you get from your followers will be in the WordPress dashboard, in the Feedback tab.
• MailerLite inside Widgets — Since you need a MailerLite account before you can integrate the feature into widgets, all feedback and relevant analytics will be in the account dashboard, mainly in the Subscribers tab.
• Revue as a separate block — After signing up for a Revue account, you can click + while editing a WordPress post or page and add a “Revue” block. Relevant feedback information will be in the account panel once again.

These products work with self-hosted versions of WordPress but require extra steps to set up. However, you’re better off using advanced email WordPress plugins. Since we don’t have a favorite, we’ll skip demonstrating any plugin. Luckily, they all boil down to the ability to see who is following a site in the WordPress Admin Section or inside the account dashboard on the plugin’s official website.

Look up analytics for people following your WordPress site on social media

Another low-effort method to review the number of followers is to check your social media. Not only does a social network show the number of followers on your site’s profile or business page, but many have also implemented exhaustive analytics tools. As an example, this is how seeing analytics on some social media works:

• Facebook: If you have a Business Page on Facebook, do this:
  1. Go to the Meta Business Suite page and click Log in.
  2. After signing in, click the Insights icon in the left sidebar.
  3. Go to the Audience tab. You can now see a breakdown of the gathered information.
• Instagram: Launch the Instagram app and then:
  1. Sign in to your creator or business account.
  2. Tap the Insights button or go to the hamburger menu in the top right corner
  3. Select Insights.
  4. Browse the “Overview” section by tapping on the content you posted or displayed metrics to see more information.

See people following your site in the dashboard of a WordPress analytics plugin

Like mailing plugins for WordPress, lots of webmasters choose to employ analytics plugins for WordPress to monitor their traffic and study their audience. Others rely entirely on adding a Google Analytics code snippet. Both options are fine, and viewing the gathered data comes down to two options:

1. Gaining a new option in the WordPress Admin section. To give you a concrete example, the “MonsterInsights” plugin adds a new section, titled Insights, with Reports options for a graphical and numerical overview of data.
2. Receiving reports to your user accounts. This can be an account on the plugin’s site or in the case of Google Analytics, your Analytics account on the Google Marketing platform, or within the Tools → Measurements section of our Google Ads account, provided you connected them.