Hits vs. Visitors
A lot of people still confuse website hits with website visitors.
I’ve seen people brag about getting a million hits to their sites.
But, hits are not the same as visitors. So, unless the person is looking at the number of visitors in their stats and calling them hits, as opposed to vice versa, those million hits are less impressive.
A “hit” is a call to your website to grab something, whether it be a page or a graphic.
A “visitor” is a person that visits your site. There may be varying differences in how statistics count a “visitor” but what it’s meant to count is how many people are actually looking at your site.
For example, let’s say that you have a web page that has four graphics on it. When someone visits that page, your site will get five hits: one hit for the page and one hit for each of the graphics. But, that’s just one visitor.
Now, if you have two visitors, you’ll have ten hits (assuming they all wait for all the graphics to load and whatnot). If you get ten visitors, you’ll have fifty hits.
Let’s say you have a photo gallery with 99 images. Those 99 images appear as thumbnails on your photo gallery page. Each time you have a visitor to that page, you’ll have 100 hits: one for the page and one for each of the thumbnail images.
So, for ten visitors, you’d have 1,000 hits. One hundred visitors would give you 10,000 hits. And so on.
So, if you’re getting 5,000 visitors a month to your blog and you want to see one million hits on your blog, put up 199 images on your landing page.
Of course, I wouldn’t recommend that because it could eat up your site’s bandwidth and you might get a bigger bill for hosting.
At any rate, that’s the difference between hits and visitors. So, be sure not to equate the two and don’t be impressed when someone brags about how many hits their site is getting. Ask them instead how many visitors they get.
I have been reading my favorite blogs in a reader to save time since the first of the year as part of my minimalist life style changes- I never seem to comment anymore… Is this a good thing or a bad thing…
I don’t know if this has anything to do with hits or not. Would you like me to hit you?
I should have known the idea of hitting something would attract your attention. I am reminded of your violent streak every time I log into Facebook and see that photo of you choking me.
So, no, I would not like you to hit me. You may visit more often though.
What kind of crazy hit counter are you using ???
Michelle’s shutters are in desperate need of paint
Wisconnee sand storms with cheese whirlwinds, I guess