How to See Your WordPress Site’s Web Traffic by Browser

What browsers are my visitors using?

It’s a common question for any WordPress site owner to ask.

You likely have a preferred browser you use every day, so you may not know what your site looks like in other browsers. It should be the same, but that’s not always the case.

Checking your site in a dozen different browsers is awfully tedious, so instead, you can simply check your engagement metrics to see if any browser is performing worse than the others.

In this guide, you’ll learn:

• How to track your traffic by browser
• How to compare performance between browsers
• Additional ways to use this data

Keep reading to find our recommendation to track browser data.

Start tracking browser data

The first thing you need to do is track the browser data of your visitors.

While there are complex analytics suites available like GA4, we’d like to propose a much simpler alternative.

If you’re using WordPress for your website, then you should try our free plugin, Independent Analytics.

It’s way simpler than platforms like Google Analytics (GA4). You don’t need to include a tracking script yourself or touch any code; everything works automatically from the moment you install the plugin.

Additionally, the interface is very easy to use and shows up right inside the WP admin dashboard. There’s no need to login to a separate site or create a new account anywhere to use it.

You’ll find familiar stats like the number of visitors, bounce rate, and views per session. Of course, you’re here to figure out where to find your traffic by browser, so let’s talk about that next.

Where to find traffic by browser

To find your traffic by browser, start by visiting the Devices report.

Once there, click on the Group by Device Type button, switch the grouping to Browser, and click the Apply button.

This is going to update the data table to show data for your browsers instead of the device types used to visit your site.

You’ll see every browser with its metrics listed in the table below like this:

As you can see, each browser includes the number of visitors, and next to that number is the percentage of total visitors it’s responsible for. For instance, the screenshot above shows that 53.45% of visitors used Chrome.

There are lots of other metrics you can enable, such as the bounce rate and visitor growth. These can be toggled via the Edit Columns button in the toolbar.

With these additional metrics enabled, you can conduct a more comprehensive analysis of each browser’s traffic.

Now that you know how to find the browsers your visitors are using and additional performance metrics for each one, let’s discuss how you can best use this data.

How to use browser traffic data

While it’s neat to see your traffic from each browser, there are actionable ways to use this data to grow your business.

Fix design issues

The first thing you’ll want to do is to check for any browsers with poor performance. In particular, you’ll want to check the bounce rate, views per session, and session duration metrics.

All metrics should be fairly similar across the browsers, so look for any that really stand out. For instance, if most of your browsers have a 70% bounce rate, but one has a 95% bounce rate, that’s a good indication that something is wrong.

If you find a browser with poor engagement, try visiting your site with the same browser on both mobile and desktop. There’s a good chance you’ll find something broken on the site that’s affecting visitor behavior.

Drop browser support

If you’re familiar with web development, then you know how tricky cross-browser support has been over the years.

This isn’t as much of a problem these days, but it’s worth checking your browser data to see if you have any visitors still using outdated browsers like Internet Explorer.

If you find an extremely small percentage of users with old browsers, then you may be able to drop support for those browsers altogether. This could allow you to add more modern features and layouts to your site that were previously impossible due to the restrictions of older browsers.

If you have a web developer on your team, make sure to share this data with them.

Start collecting browser data

Finding the browsers your visitors use is easy when you have the right tools.

And once you know which browsers are being used, you can check user engagement for each one. If you find any browser with lagging metrics, try it out yourself to check for obvious bugs and glitches on your site.

If you don’t have a way to track browser traffic yet, you can get started today with our free plugin:

We hope it helps you greatly in optimizing your site!

Thanks for reading this guide on finding your web traffic by browser. You can post in the comments section below if you have any questions or feedback.