subject: How do I track how many hits my website [print this page] How do I track how many hits my website How do I track how many hits my website
People generally want to measure the traffic that their websites receive because that is a very good indicator of how well your website is doing. Generally internet service provider are able to give you statistics on the amount of traffic that the sites receive, be it hits, page views or visitors.
Hits are a measure of traffic that your website attracts. Technically speaking, hits are the retrieval of files from the web server to your browser. Each image or graphic on the page that is sent to your browse also including the page itself (html file) will be considered individual hits.
Note that even the page itself is an html file and therefore is a hit. So even if you visit just one page, if it has a lot of data like animations, images etc. you generate a lot of hits. Therefore, generally page views are considered a much better measure of website traffic than hits. People generally want to measure the traffic that their websites receive because that is a very good indicator of how well your website is doing. Generally internet service provider are able to give you statistics on the amount of traffic that the sites receive, be it hits, page views or visitors.
In fact, you can often receive detailed breakdowns of what parts of your site are visited most often, how long visitors stay on your site, where they're from, how they got to your site and more. However it takes a professional to understand these statistics. You can try installing visitor tracking code on your website, such as Google Analytics which is free. It will track how many hits, pages views and unique visitors your website receives daily, weekly and monthly. This is confidential information and is only available to the account holder.
The best measure of traffic is visitor session. However one visitor may have visited your site more than once. The number of unique visitors tells you how many different individuals came to the website and they're identified by the IP address of their computer.
Whatever be the measure, hits, page views or visitors your ultimate aim is to increase the numbers of all of them and you have to take steps accordingly to increase traffic.
