How Much Traffic Does This Website Get

Traffic is the blood of a website. Without it the site dies. Without traffic your site is just a bunch of bytes sitting on a quietly humming machine. If a tree falls in the forest and there is nobody around to hear it does it make a sound? Who knows? But if you build a website and nobody visits it really sucks.

There are two parts to having a website. First and foremost you need a website. Secondly and just as important is that you need to drive traffic to it. Unfortunately it does not come uncalled. You need to be constantly standing at the side of the road in a clown suit, waving your arms in the air and shouting: “come to my website”.

Getting traffic is the hard part of having a website. Anybody can learn to make a website, but only a few can master the cryptic art of getting traffic. When you figure out how to get traffic to a site most of battle is won.

Website Daily Traffic - All Time

NOTE:

There are 2 main methods of collecting traffic data for a website:

Server Side
Client Side

Server side means that the website hosting server counts that number of times a webpage is requested. So every time the server is asked to send a webpage somewhere, regardless of who is asking, the server counts it as a visitor. The most popular server side traffic software is AWSTATS.

Client side means that there is a small script placed on every webpage. When a webpage is viewed on a browser (like the one you are using to view this page) then the little script runs and registers a visit. The most popular client side traffic software is Google Analytics.

For this website I use both types. The problem is that they do not give the same results. The server side stats are always higher – for this website server visitor statistics are 50% higher then client side. There are a few reasons for this:

Servers side counts all requests for a webpage as a visitor. It does not care if it is human or machine. There are lots of programs written to search webpages for data – mostly for spamming purposes. Client side, on the other hand, only counts visitors that actually view the webpage with a browser. So client side gives a more accurate picture of the number of human visitors to your website.
The problem with client side traffic stats is that they are usually lower then the reality. This is because some people forbid their browser from running any scripts – usually for security reasons or because they do not want to see advertisements. Since no scripts are allow to run, even the script that counts visitors is not allowed to run. In this case the visitor is invisible and not counted – only server side can count this visitor.

For these reasons it is not possible to get an accurate count of how many human visitors view your webpages. The best you can do is to assume that your actual traffic lies somewhere between the server side traffic count and the client side count.

Since I did not want to use an average of traffic statistics for this website I had to choose between reporting client side traffic and server side traffic. I decided to use the server side traffic stats.

Therefore, because the visitor statistics for this website are server side, the real number of human visitors is probably 25% lower then the visitors reported.