About This Website

As part of the City's ongoing commitment to improve the City website, staff enlisted a group of community volunteers to serve on a Website Advisory Committee with the goal of producing a set of recommendations to address concerns raised by citizens and enhance the overall website user-experience. The Website Advisory Committee, comprised of a select group of dedicated community volunteers, has met regularly during the past three years to help City staff with the creation of our present website.

Below you will find statistics about the performance of this site. The statistics are updated on a monthly basis for the prior month's activity. To the left are buttons to take you to information about the ongoing maintenance of this website, Ways to contact the City of Palo Alto about this website, and legal information.

Data For Month of February 2021
Quick Facts
Visits 195,385
Unique Visitors 164,066
Pageviews 549,299
Visits Per Day 6,978
Pages / Visit 2.81
Avg. Visit Duration 0:54 min
% New Visits 79%
The "Quick Facts" section provides "at a glance" information about this website.

Note: When somebody comes to this website, that constitutes a "visit". If the same person (from the same computer) visits again, that visit is counted again, but the "Unique Visitors" number does not increment, it counts two visits from the same computer in a certain period as one visit.
Top Pages
PageUnique Views
News Details35,652
Home12,556
Foothills Park9,325
Pearson-Arastradero Preserve5,752
Utilities4,520
Testing3,326
Site Search2,578
Coronavirus2,169
Baylands2,116
Junior Museum & Zoo1,663
Building Permits1,558
Departments1,441
City Council / CAO1,430
DS Online Permitting Services1,369
Police Report Log1,312

With website metrics, a trend is generally more useful than any one snapshot in time. This information can be very useful in helping City Staff to determine what information visitors are looking for the most.

The Home Page of this site has a "Most Popular" corner, but it is a curated list, whereas these results are based on raw data.
Top Referring Keywords
city of palo alto
city of palo alto jobs opportunities
city of paloalto
foothills park
palo alto
palo alto police department
city of palo alto citizen portal
palo alto police logs
animal control palo alto
city of palo alto electric schedule
city of palo alto jobs
city of palo alto sewer charges
foothiulls park
pa junior museum and zoo

When visitors come to the website as a result of a Google search, analytics captures the terms the visitor entered to find the site. This report helps City Staff determine visitor's interests in both the short (monthly) and long (annual) term.

New site content is one outcome of analysis of this report. Another outcome is the addition of keywords to commonly sought after pages to make them more easily found by a search.
Mobile Devices
DeviceVisits
Apple iPhone25,565
Apple iPad1,314
Google Pixel 3486
Microsoft Windows RT Tablet443
Google Pixel 4240
Google Pixel 3a233
Unknown 230
Google Pixel 4 XL230
Google Pixel 4a222
Google Pixel 5205
Samsung SM-G960U205
Google Pixel 2203
Google Pixel 3 XL201
Samsung SM-G973U173
Samsung SM-G965U167

This month, mobile devices accounted for of website visits.

Mobile devices users are an increasingly important website visitor segment.

As of May 2018, Wikipedia ranks global browser popularity:

Chrome, 58%

Safari, 14%
Firefox, 5%
IE, 3%

Edge, 2%