How to know how much traffic a particular website receives?

So you want to find out more about a particular website which isn’t yours. In particular, you want to know how much traffic that website receives. How to find out?

The short answer is – you can ask the site’s owner directly (the only LEGIT & ACCURATE way), or you can SPECULATE with online tools like “Alexa”, “Compete”, etc. (prepare for INACCURATE results).

All these online “tools” that are available online are ALL CRAP and show most of the time completely inaccurate data IF your interest is just to find out how much traffic a website receives (exact or close to exact number). You can only speculate with these tools and how accurate your result will be – no one knows for sure. However, sometimes, these tools can show you just at least that the website receives at least some traffic. If a website has Alexa rank of over 5-10 millions, it should be clear that either it’s still new or receives a very small traffic. However, there are thousands of websites with around 1 million Alexa rank and receive some decent traffic, while there are thousands of other websites with around 100k Alexa rank and receive less traffic than these websites with Alexa rank of around 1 million. Why is that?

The answer to that ^^ is that Alexa rank calculates their rank only by visitors who use Alexa toolbars/add-ons in their browsers. So if a website receives most of its traffic from visitors without the toolbar, its rank won’t be decent. However, if a website receives a lot of traffic, there will be always at least some visitors with the toolbar, because millions of people around the world use the toolbar, but in general, more people don’t use the toolbar compared to the ones who use it so this plays a big role in how accurate the results are. The same applies to all other free tools out there. They can’t know how much traffic a particular website receives without having some code installed in each website or toolbars/add-ons installed in people’s browsers that trace what websites people visit. Also, a lot of smaller online tools scrap data from bigger online tools and they can even charge you with their premium features that are crap anyways. Personally, I wouldn’t buy any premium features from any of these online tools, no matter it’s Alexa or any other big online tool which still shows inaccurate data about websites REAL traffic.

Don’t get me wrong when I say that these tools are all crap. These tools are only crap if you want to find out exactly how much traffic a particular website receives. These tools are actually good if you just want to speculate. These tools are also good to see if a website is still new or receives small or no traffic at all – If Alexa shows no data or a bad rank (10+ millions), you can be sure that a website is still new or receives small traffic, however, again, that’s not 100% accurate. If Alexa shows a very good rank (below 50K), you can be sure that a website receives some nice traffic (still can’t know how much exactly — you can only speculate — but at least can know that it receives more than a little traffic and is not a new website). And again, in reality, a website with Alexa rank of let’s say 800,000 can receive way more traffic than a website with Alexa rank of let’s say 100,000. Websites with better ranks just receive more traffic from visitors with the toolbar — this depends a lot on a website’s niche, traffic sources, etc.. — but it doesn’t mean that a website with a better rank than another website’s is receives more REAL/GENERAL traffic than that another website. It could receive more or less. Again, you can only speculate.

The only LEGIT way you can really find out how much traffic a website receives is by asking the site’s owner. Of course, no guarantees that the owner is going to say truth to you. But, you can ask for a proof like a screenshot, etc.. — don’t expect to get an answer if you’re just a random guy (not looking to advertise on the site, etc..), because most of the time, you won’t receive an answer for that. No one is going to waste their time for giving a proof to random people who have no interest in advertising, etc.. So again, these online tools are good for speculation if you are just that random guy. However, as I mentioned previously, don’t expect to see accurate data from these tools, because the only accurate data is available in a LEGIT proof from the site’s owner.

And for the last words, I want to say that these online tools can show not just websites traffic. These tools can show more than that. Again, how accurate their other statistics are, I can’t say for sure…I wouldn’t bet a lot on that…Some statistics could be accurate enough, others not really…When it comes to REAL traffic, all of them are totally inaccurate (at least most of the time).