Why Anonymous Visitor Detection

If someone visits your website and does nothing but read a page or two and leave, can you figure out who they are? Historically, the answer has been no because web browsers like Chrome are designed to be secure and not give away personal information, unless the visitor explicitly fills out a form and provides that information. In other words, unless someone buys something from your website, or fills out a form that requests personal information, you have no way of knowing their name, email address or other personally identifying details. Since only a fraction of your site visitors will ever fill out a contact form, many website owners are missing out on the vast majority of website leads that come to their site.

The information that can be collected by your website without a visitor’s consent is limited and includes the IP address their computer is currently assigned, the page they visited, the date and time, the type of browser they used, and the type of computer they are on. From this basic information, Google Analytics can discern an amazing amount of data such as what country your visitors are coming from primarily, or what is the most popular page on your website. However, none of this tells you who the person is or gives you any way to contact them in the future.

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The speed of your WordPress website is important for SEO and also for retaining site visitors and converting them to prospects or customers. Various

studies by Google, CloudFlare and others have consistently found that bounce rates go down and conversion rates get better as site speed improves, sometimes dramatically. For example, according to Google, as page load time goes from 1s to 5s, the probability of a visitor bouncing increases 90%! *

Before racing down the road of optimizing your site speed, we recommend that you read The Problems with Google PageSpeed Insights so that you are certain you are measuring the performance of your site by the correct metrics. If you are just using the “grades” that Google and other site speed tests provide, you may be mis-informed. The only true metric is page load speed.

If you have a WordPress site that is slow, here are some ways you can improve its speed. The list below is not comprehensive and different sites will have different reasons for why they are slow, but we’ve ordered the list in terms of what we’ve found to have the greatest effect on speed, with the most impactful at the top.

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Microsoft Windows has the largest worldwide market share of all operating systems. As a result, it’s also the number one target for virus writers. If you want your virus or malware to infect the most number of computers, you would logically write it for Windows.

Similarly, WordPress has the largest market share among web platforms worldwide. And, like Windows, it’s also the number one targeted platform for hackers. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t use WordPress. It just means that you need to take precautions to ensure that your site is secure. We’ve helped secure hundreds of WordPress websites and helped fix many hacked sites over the years. Following is a discussion, based on our own experience, of the most important things you can do to keep your site from being hacked. This is not a comprehensive list of everything you could do, but rather a highly selective list of the things we believe will make the most difference in keeping your site secure.

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