Web Dev Notes

Are you using Webalizer to report your site statistics? Have you ever wondered what all those numbers really mean? Understanding your Webalizer site statistics is important because it gives you an idea of how well you are doing and where you should focus more attention!

Hits
Hits are not a very trustworthy statistic and should really be ignored at all times because it is not reflective of traffic to your website. Hits are the number of individual requests for all file types that are received by the server. Think about this for a second. If your page only contains text, then a visitor will generate one hit when visiting the page. If you add an image to the page, a visitor loading the page will now generate two hits because they request the page and then request the image.

You can even have hits showing up in your statistics that are generated from other websites! For example, if you use an image saved on your server as a signature in a forum, then each time someone visitng this forum loads a page on which you have posted, they will load your image and therefore generate a hit that will show up in your statistics! If the forum you visit has tons of traffic, you may start thinking your website is very popular when in fact all the hits showing up in your statistics are coming from your forum signature on another website!

Since single pages on your website can generate multiple hits each time they are loaded and because crawlers like GoogleBot as well as off-site images can all generate hits, it is important to ignore this stat unless you are starting to worry about reaching your bandwidth limit!

Files
Files are related to hits. Files are the number of hits that resulted in something actually being sent back to the user such as text or an image. Therefore, if a user requests a page that does not exist, the server will receive the request and count this as a hit, however a 404-page not found error will occur and this will therefore not count as a file.

Another time where a hit will be generated but not a file is when a user is visiting a page that they have visited recently. In such a case, the page will be ‘cached’ meaning it is saved locally in order to speed up the page-load time. While the page text will likely be requested again, things like images will be loaded from the local copy in order to reduce the load on the server. You can test this if you want by overwriting an image on your website then loading the page. You will likely see the old image until your force a reload by hitting the refresh button or wait a certain amount of time.

Pages
Here is your first useful statistic which is extremely important when it comes to analyzing your traffic! This represents the number of individual pages that were viewed! This actually tells you how much of your content is actually being viewed. You will notice that this number is much smaller than your hits! Don’t be depressed, I was sad too when I found out this number was meaningful and hits was not!

Visits
Visits are another very important statistic. This stat shows how many actual visits there have been to your website. This number will be smaller than your pages statistic because if your site has good content, a single visitor will usually load more than one page! Looking at the difference between pages and visitors can give you a good idea of how much people are enjoying your website. If your content is not very good, the difference between pages and visitors will be smaller!

Sites
The name of this statistic is a bit confusing so most people generally have no idea what it means. The “sites” stat actually tries to take your “visitors” stat and then determine how many of those visitors were unique. This of course is not 100% accurate because of proxy server and changing IP addresses, but still often provides a god estimate.

To better help you understand this, imagine you have created a private blog and are the only visitor. You then visit the site once a day for one month. Your site statistics will therefore report that you had 30 visitors from a total of 1 site. Of course, if one day you visited your blog from work, the stat would say you had 30 visitors from a total of 2 sites!

KBytes
This statistic represents the volume of data transferred from your server. Usually you can ignore this unless you are worried that you receive enough traffic that you could possibly reach your bandwidth limits!

It’s still a good idea to keep an eye on this from time to time to make sure nobody is abusing your website! Sometimes people will use images from your website on their own site by linking to them. This could therefore put an extra load on your server that you are not even benefitting from!

WebDevNotes Example
Let’s examine the statistics for this website for the month of May 2007!

Pages: 45,273
Visits: 8,935
Sites: 2,420
Hits: 62,741
Files: 53, 671
KBytes: 2,188,751

So what do these numbers tell me? I know that 45,273 pages were viewed on my site by approximately 2,420 different people. If I divide these numbers, I feel confident that my website is providing quality content because that means on average, each unique visitor read about 18 pages during this month! The actual visits count is 8,935 which means that on average each of the 2,420 sites (unique visitors) came back to Web Dev Notes about 3 or 4 times throughout the month. Of course, these are just averages. In reality, some people likely visited once and never came back and others visited nearly everyday thanks to the 451 Press channels and my news feed which let people know of my daily updates.

What about the hits, the files and the KBytes? Well, I don’t really care anymore. I’ve figure out everything I wanted to know about my traffic already without these statistics. This is why you should ignore these stats. They likely do not tell you anything you actually want to know. They are just big numbers and distracting your attention away from the important information you need to know.