Hits and Visits in plain English

With the web page stats there is often two misunderstood terms in regards to the statistics for your website.

Those terms are Hits and Visits.

1. A hit is a single Action on the web site. If you were to take a webpage that has two graphics on it. This would be counted as 3 hits. The actually page itself being one hit and the two graphics both taking one hit itself. Each element that needs to load in a page would be counted as a hit. Thus the hit count for your site would be higher as each page could have several different elements that are needed to be loaded.

2. A visit is the actual number of people who have visited your site; this is tracked by the IP address of the user coming into the site. If one person is on your website for 10 minutes that counts as one visit. It is possible however for one user to count as two visits even though they have not left your site. This is because the system calculates the time period between requests and if this time period is longer than the default setting of thirty minutes, then this would count as a second visit. In other words if someone loads a page, spends more than thirty minutes reading page without clicking on any other link. Once they click on another link they would be counted as new visit to your site even though they have always been on your site.