How to display to visitor which site they came from?

Question

kind of new to this so not sure how to go about this. The task given to me is to that when a visitor arrives at the site through a link, I need to display to them where they came from.

So if they used Google and clicked on a link in Google to load my site, the site would say something like "Welcome visitor from www.google.com."

First, how to get the information where they came from, I don't really know. I was originally considering using the WP Statistics plugin, but then I was told that the HTTP header would contain this information. I don't really know what the HTTP header is or how it works or if there are exceptions.

What would I use to figure out the referreer, and how can I display that to the user? This site is self-hosted so I have access to all the files via my hosting provider's cPanel.

I am using the "Basic" WordPress theme. Thanks.

Answer 1

WordPress has a function that can extract referrer information (website where user originated from): wp_get_referer().

It will return URL from the originating website. If that is not available it will return FALSE.

This is the simple example PHP function that will display welcome message when called, if the referrer is set:

function wse_280729_show_welcome_message() {
  $ref = wp_get_referer();

  if ($ref) {
    echo "Welcome visitor from '$ref'.";
  }
}

How will you use this is up to you, and depends where you want to display this, and will involve some theme modification and calling this function to show the message (if referrer is set).