Hi there,
A longer gap than usual between these — Michelle and I took a brief vacation, which I'd recommend to anyone. Thank you for your patience. We came back to something genuinely worth telling you about.
Right now, your site is the only part of your teaching that never reports back.
Your class tells you who turned up. Your inbox tells you who replied. Your site takes the link you spent an evening perfecting, sends it out into the world, and returns absolutely nothing. Did that Instagram post do anything? Is anyone finding you on Google? You've had no way to know — so most teachers stop wondering, and quietly assume the answer is no.
That ends today — and we suspect you will find it hard to go back.
Meet "How your site is doing"
There's a new chart icon in your editor's top bar. Click it.
You'll get the short version right there in a side panel, and a full report one click further. And it answers the question you've actually been asking all along: where are these people coming from?
- Search engines — someone googled, and found you
- Messages — WhatsApp, iMessage, a text to a student
- Direct or saved — typed in, bookmarked, tapped from your link-in-bio
- Any other site that linked to you, named
Real numbers, in your own language. No "sessions". No "bounce rate". No dashboard that needs a tutorial before it means anything. You'll know within about four seconds whether your last post was worth the effort — and that is a genuinely different feeling from posting into silence.
And there is nothing to set up. No Google Analytics account. No tracking code to paste into a box you don't understand. No cookie banner suddenly squatting on the beautiful page you built.
That last one matters more than it sounds. Every other way of doing this would have put a consent pop-up in front of your visitors — on a site whose entire appeal is that it feels calm. So we built ours differently: no cookies, no fingerprinting, nothing at all stored about the person visiting. All we keep is a daily tally per source, the sort of thing you'd scratch on a notepad by the door. Your visitors' privacy stays intact, your page stays clean, and you still get the answer.
Your own visits don't count toward it. Neither do the bots.
Share links that count themselves
Now the part that will quietly double what your report is worth.
Here's a thing nobody tells you about analytics: when someone taps your link inside an Instagram story, or opens it from a text message, the browser hands over nothing whatsoever about where they came from. It's a dead end. Those visits pile into "Direct or saved" and the credit evaporates — which is exactly why so many teachers conclude social media "doesn't work" for them. So we fixed it at the source. Your report gives you three buttons:
Copy link for Instagram · Copy link for email · Copy link for messages
Share using the matching one and those visits land in the right column. You never see a tracking parameter, you never have to understand one, and neither does anyone else — the tag is tidied out of the address bar the instant a visitor arrives, so they just see your normal, clean site address.
If you change one habit this month, make it this one. It's the whole difference between "47 people came directly" and "your Tuesday story brought me 31 people" — and only one of those tells you what to do next Tuesday.
Just published? Here's what you'll see
If your site is new, you won't get a breakdown straight away. You'll get a progress bar counting toward 25 visits — and a much better message than zeros.
We chose that on purpose, because the alternative is worse. At eight visits, a breakdown invents patterns that aren't there: two people from search becomes "25% of my traffic is search", which sounds authoritative and means nothing. We'd rather say "it's early" than hand you a confident chart built on almost nothing.
So until you cross 25, you get your real count, your progress toward it, and the reason — plus the single most useful thing you can do about it, which is send your link to a few students. Sites get their first visitors when their teacher shares them. That's not a consolation prize; it's the actual mechanism.
And if your site is quiet because it isn't published, or because it went offline, the page tells you that instead of cheerfully reporting that nobody's been by.
Uploads: three things that were quietly broken
Your bio photo on setup now actually uploads. If you signed up recently and that step just… didn't work, it wasn't you. It had been broken since we rebuilt the image picker. It's fixed.
Uploads no longer die if you leave the editor open. Leave a tab open an hour, come back, add an image, and it would fail — with nothing useful on screen — until you reloaded. Your uploads now stay valid for as long as your tab is.
And when an upload does fail, it tells you why. Every failure used to look identical. Now you get the actual reason and the actual fix:
- "That image is too large. Please choose one under 10 MB."
- "Your session has expired. Refresh the page, then add your image again."
- "The upload could not reach the server. Check your connection and try again."
Not glamorous. But "something went wrong" at the exact moment you're trying to finish your page is its own small betrayal, and it deserved fixing properly.
Also, under the hood
- Cleared out unused code left over from the old upload system.
- Tightened how default themes are stored, so a new site can't end up without one.
- Fixed a configuration issue that was blocking deploys.
Nothing you'll see — but exactly the sort of thing that stops being invisible at the worst possible moment.
Your two minutes this week
- Open the chart icon in your editor. See where your people are coming from.
- Next time you post your link, grab it from Copy link for Instagram instead of the address bar. Future you will know exactly what that post was worth.
If your report looks wrong for your site, message us through the support chat in the editor and we'll look at your specific setup.