Realtime
Who is on your site right now: the live counter, the visitor feed, and how presence works.
What you see
The realtime view answers one question: right now. How many people are on the site this moment, which pages they are reading, where they are from, on what devices, and a rolling feed of pageviews as they happen. It updates over a live stream, with no refreshing, so a launch or a post going out is something you watch rather than reload.
How presence works
- The tracker sends a small heartbeat every few seconds while a tab is visible. Presence is built from heartbeats, so someone reading quietly, not clicking anything, still counts as online.
- A hidden tab stops heartbeating and the visitor ages out of the view within minutes. Realtime state lives about five minutes and is never stored historically.
- The count is people, not tabs: the same visitor open in two tabs is one presence.
Present without a feed entry
This is the ordinary case, not a bug
A visitor can be online without a line in the feed. The feed lists pageviews, and someone who arrived before your window opened has fresh heartbeats but no fresh pageview. The Online count includes them, and a separate line notes how many are present without a recent pageview, so the two numbers always reconcile.
Sharing realtime
The live count can leave the dashboard three ways, each on its own switch, so you can show presence without showing anything else:
- On a public dashboard, as a count-only switch separate from the history board.
- As an embeddable widget, the live visitor number in an iframe anywhere.
- Over the read API for your own code, via short-lived stream tokens.