What Is The Live Traffic Feature And How To Use it?

Live Traffic feature is designed to provide real-time visibility into all incoming traffic to your WordPress site by temporarily logging all requests, without any exclusions. This feature can be useful for monitoring site activity, debugging issues, or gaining insights into user behavior.

Important points to note

• Enabling Live Traffic can lead to a substantial increase in your database size, especially for high-traffic sites. Therefore, it is not recommended for continuous use and should only be activated when necessary.
• It is intended for temporary use, primarily for diagnostic or monitoring purposes. It is not meant to replace standard traffic logging.
• Keep in mind that Live Traffic places an additional load on your database and server resources. Ensure that your infrastructure can handle the increased load during its activation.
• It's advisable to disable Live Traffic when you no longer require it. This can be done manually or will happen automatically after 30 minutes of continuous operation.

How to use the Life Traffic feature

Firstly, you'll need to have Traffic Logger already enabled and then activate the Live Traffic option from within the main Config menu > Traffic section > Traffic Logging Options.

Live Traffic is designed to be used temporarily. After 30 minutes of continuous operation, it will automatically deactivate itself. This is done to prevent your database from becoming excessively large due to continuous logging.

You will see a notice informing you of its potential impact on your database and a countdown timer indicating when Live Traffic will automatically disable itself. (see image below)

All traffic logged during the Live Traffic session will be available on the Live Logs Viewer page which is accessible directly from within the Live Traffic settings page.

You can also access it under the normal Site Traffic section/page.

The live traffic logs viewer is a trimmed-down, simplified view on the traffic log. This view is useful regardless of whether or not the live traffic option is enabled. It displays the logs in a simply, standardised format, and when the "Live Traffic" option is enabled in settings, viewer will automatically update the log display on-screen every 7 seconds. If the option is disabled in settings, live traffic viewer is still available but you may not see many updates.

By using Live Logs Viewer, you can review the data to analyze site activity, identify issues, or gather insights.

Live traffic page example

Live Traffic is a valuable feature that allows you to log all incoming traffic to your site temporarily. Always monitor the automatic deactivation timer and consider disabling Live Traffic when it is no longer needed to ensure the optimal performance of your site.

Note: ShieldPRO is required for the Live Traffic feature. To find out what the extra ShieldPRO features are and how to purchase, please follow this link here.