How to Add a Visitor Badge to Your GitHub Profile README

A visitor badge is a dynamic image that tracks and displays how many times a specific page or asset has been loaded. On GitHub profiles, it counts every time the README is rendered — by human visitors, search engine crawlers, link preview services, and automated bots alike. The total count is therefore a rough approximation of interest rather than a precise visitor metric.

The badge renders as a standard shields.io-style badge, making it visually consistent with other badges in your README. It is most meaningful for profiles with substantial traffic from popular repositories or a strong developer community presence. For new profiles, an early low count may be more distracting than useful.

Add this to your README, replacing YOUR_USERNAME with your GitHub username:

![Visitors](https://visitor-badge.laobi.icu/badge?page_id=YOUR_USERNAME.YOUR_USERNAME)

The page_id should be username.username for profile READMEs (which live in the username/username repository). For a repository-specific badge:

![Visitors](https://visitor-badge.laobi.icu/badge?page_id=YOUR_USERNAME.REPO_NAME)

For a styled badge with labels:

![Visitors](https://visitor-badge.laobi.icu/badge?page_id=YOUR_USERNAME.YOUR_USERNAME&left_color=gray&right_color=blue&left_text=Visitors)

Alternative option using komarev.com:

![Profile Views](https://komarev.com/ghpvc/?username=YOUR_USERNAME&color=blue&style=flat&label=Profile+Views)

The visitor-badge.laobi.icu service supports several customization parameters:

• left_color: Background color of the label side (e.g., gray, blue, or hex)
• right_color: Background color of the count side
• left_text: Custom label text (default: 'visitors')
• format: Set to svg (default) or png

For style options matching shields.io badges, use the komarev.com service instead, which supports flat, flat-square, plastic, and for-the-badge styles. The for-the-badge style matches the large tech stack badges commonly used in README skill sections.

For a minimal integration, place the badge in the top-right corner of your profile header, formatted as a small flat badge. For a more prominent display, use for-the-badge style in your profile's stats section.

If the badge shows a broken image or error, verify the page_id format is correct: username.username for profile repositories. The most common mistake is using only the username or omitting the second part.

If the count appears stuck and is not incrementing, it may be a caching issue on GitHub's end. GitHub caches images from external sources for several minutes — the count is updating server-side but you may not see the latest number immediately.

If the visitor-badge.laobi.icu service is unavailable (it has experienced intermittent outages), switch to the komarev.com alternative: https://komarev.com/ghpvc/?username=YOUR_USERNAME. Both services track counts independently, so switching will start a fresh count.