The Visits card
On your dashboard, Visits shows two numbers: This month and Last month. Each is the number of pages your readers opened on your site, today’s included.
As the card says, visits are “counted without cookies, and with nothing about who”. Each page opened adds one to a plain daily count for your site. Nothing records which reader opened it, where they came from or what device they used, so there are no charts of sources or countries, and your visitors see no cookie banner.
Two things to know when reading the numbers:
- It counts pages, not people. A reader who opens your home page, a book and three chapters counts five.
- Search engines that announce themselves are left out, so the number means readers. A few robots that hide what they are may still slip in.
What is kept about your Members is a different matter, and is explained under Members: their email address, and for 90 days which chapters they opened and marked read.
The weekly digest
Every Monday morning, at 08:00 UTC, you get an email headed “Your week on your site”, covering the seven days before. It lists only what happened:
- New Members;
- Chapters opened and Chapters marked read by Members;
- Hearts;
- Typo Reports, with how many are waiting for you;
- Downloads by Members;
- and, under Unlocking next week, the chapters you have scheduled.
In a week when nothing happened, no email is sent.
To stop it, press Turn it off at the foot of any digest; no sign-in is needed. To switch it back on, or off again, use Mail me a weekly digest in your profile.
What your site does for search engines
Every site is set up for search engines from the start, with nothing to install:
- Page titles: each page’s own title followed by your site title, such as a book’s title on its page.
- Descriptions, the line under the link in search results: a book’s blurb, a post’s excerpt, a series’ description, or otherwise your tagline.
- Sharing images: when someone shares a book or a post, the cover is the picture; elsewhere it is your photo.
- A sitemap, at your address followed by /sitemap.xml, listing your books, the chapters anyone can read, your posts and your pages, so new ones are found quickly. Drafts, Members chapters and scheduled posts stay out of it until they are public.
- A feed, at /feed, of your new posts and Open chapters, and one for each book at /books/the book’s address/feed.
- Structured data, which tells search engines that a book page is a book, with its author, series, number in the series, formats, ISBN, release date and shops, and that your home page is about you, with your social links.
- One address for each page, and when you rename a book, chapter, series, post or page, or change your site address, the old address redirects to the new one, so links others have shared keep working.
Helping them along
The settings above do the technical part. The rest is what you write, and where your address appears.
- Write a tagline that says what you write in plain words: “Cosy mysteries set on the Cornish coast” is what a reader might search for.
- Give every book a blurb, and its ISBN if it has one.
- Give posts an excerpt, or open them with a sentence that could stand on its own.
- Put your address in your social profiles, your store author pages, your email signature and the back matter of every book. Search engines find a site mostly by the links that lead to it, and these are the ones you control.
Your site lives on a shared address, so tools such as Google Search Console, which ask you to prove the site is yours by adding a file or a tag to it, cannot be set up for it yet. That will change when custom domains arrive. Until then, the links above are how search engines find you, and they do.
For more on all of this, our guide to making an author website has a section on helping people find it.
Still stuck, or found something wrong on this page? Contact support.