Reading the visitor list
Who is on your website right now, what the columns mean, and what it is actually good for.
Visitors shows who is on your websites at this moment: the page they are on, roughly where they are, how long they have been reading, and whether they have chatted before.
The count next to Visitors in the sidebar is the same number, so you can see it without leaving the inbox.
The columns
- Visitor is a number for somebody anonymous, or a name once they have identified themselves or chatted.
- Location is worked out from their IP address. See where visitor locations come from before you rely on it.
- Page is where they are now. This is the useful one.
- Time on site is this visit, not their history.
- Device is browser and operating system.
- Visits is how many times they have been before.
What it is actually good for
Seeing where the questions come from. Half a dozen people sitting on the same page is a page that is not explaining itself, and that is a cheaper problem to fix than answering it six times.
Context before you reply. When a chat starts, knowing they have been on the returns page for four minutes tells you what this is about before they say.
Knowing whether it is quiet or broken. Zero visitors on a Tuesday afternoon usually means the widget has stopped loading, not that nobody came.
What it is not good for
Watching people. It is a live list of strangers and it is tempting to treat as a spectator sport, and doing so is a poor use of an afternoon.
More to the point: your customers can see it too, in the sense that they can reasonably ask what you record about them. If keeping the list feels uncomfortable, switch it off.
Switching it off
Settings → Websites → your site → Privacy, under live visitors. With it off, nobody is recorded until they actually open the chat. Nothing else about the widget changes.
That is a real option rather than a token one. If you never use the list, not collecting it is strictly better: less to hold, less to explain, less to delete.
Visitors are not contacts
A visitor is a browser session, and it disappears after thirty days regardless of your other settings. A contact is a person who has chatted, and they persist. Somebody browsing anonymously is only ever a visitor.
Last updated 22 September 2026.