Live Visitors shows you who is on your website right now — before they ever open the chat. The Visitors page lists every active visitor with their current page, location, device and visit history, and lets you make the first move: send a chat invite that opens the widget on their screen with your greeting.
Live Visitors is available on the Pro and Ultimate plans and works through the web chat widget. All data is first-party: it comes from your own site, through your own widget.
Before you start
- Your plan must include Live Visitors (Pro or Ultimate).
- The web chat widget must be installed on your site — see Setting Up the Web Chat Widget. Visitors are tracked on pages where the widget script is present.
Opening the Visitors page
Click Visitors in the left sidebar. Presence is tracked per project, so pick the project next to the page title. The header shows live stats: Online (people on your site right now), Today and 7 days (unique visitors), New / returning for today, and your top visitor countries.
What you see for each visitor
The left panel lists everyone currently on the site. Each row shows the visitor's name (if known from the pre-chat form or an earlier conversation), the page they are viewing and how long they have been on the site. You can search by page, name or country. Status badges:
- Online / Idle — Online means active within the last minute or so; after a few quiet minutes the visitor switches to Idle and then drops off the list.
- New / Returning — whether this browser has visited your site before.
- In chat — the visitor currently has an open conversation.
Click a visitor to open the detail panel:
- Pages — the current page plus the page history of this visit.
- Location & network — country (plus city and network provider where available) and IP address.
- Device & source — browser, operating system, the referrer that brought them, and campaign (UTM) tags.
- Activity — first seen, last seen, current visit duration, total number of visits.
- Conversations — the visitor's open and past conversations with your team.
Starting the chat first
- Select a visitor in the list.
- Type a short greeting in the invite box. Something concrete works best — for example: “Hi! I see you're on the pricing page — happy to help you pick a plan.”
- Click Send invite.
On the visitor's screen the chat widget opens automatically with your message. On your side Chatonio creates a conversation, assigns it to you, so you are ready when the reply arrives. If the visitor already has an open conversation, the panel shows Open chat instead — click it to jump into the existing thread.
If the visitor doesn't answer, nothing else happens — the invite is a single widget message, with no follow-ups and no emails.
Privacy and accuracy
- First-party only. All data comes from your own website through the widget. Chatonio does not track visitors across other sites and does not share data with ad networks.
- Returning-visitor detection uses an identifier stored in the visitor's own browser, scoped to your site. If they clear browser data, they show up as new again.
- Location is an estimate derived from the network connection — treat city-level data as approximate.
- Bots are filtered. Search-engine crawlers and automated traffic are excluded, so the list reflects real people.
I don't see any visitors
- Check that the widget is installed and loading on the pages in question.
- Check the plan: the page shows “Live Visitors isn't available on this plan” when the project owner's plan doesn't include the feature.
- The list is live — it shows people on the site right now, not historical traffic, and a brand-new visitor can take a few seconds to appear after landing.