Do a lot of "hits" mean your Web site IS a hit?

When news media want to indicate how popular a web site is, they usually tell how many "hits" the site gets in a day, week or month. Usually, this number is enormous — and very impressive.

It's impressive because most people believe that a "hit" equals a visitor. It doesn't. A "hit" is counted every time a file is requested from your server. The file can be a page of text, an image, a sound, or code that makes your web page do cool things. Way back in the early days of the World Wide Web (a whole decade or so ago), web pages only had one or two files. Back then, a hit was a fairly reliable way to estimate visitors.

This page has seven files — one text file and six graphic files. When you clicked the link that brought you to this page, seven hits were recorded. Maybe this is the third or fourth page on my site you've visited. Wow! From your one visit, the Maid may have gotten 30 or 40 hits that she can use to impress friends and clients.

An elaborately designed web site may have 50, 60 or more files per page (some graphics files are very tiny), which means such a site could easily record a million hits a month. No wonder it seems that everyone on the planet does nothing but surf the Internet!

If you really want to know how many people visit your site, look for a statistic called "visits," "distinct hosts," or something similar. This counts the number of different computers that log onto your web site, and is the best stat for approximating the number of actual visitors you have.

Even that stat can be deflated or inflated. Many Internet Service Providers (AOL, for instance) store web pages on their servers in a "cache" to make the Internet faster for their users. If the visitor's request for your web pages makes it only as far as the ISP cache, you won't record a visit in your stats total.

On the flip side, if you make your web site your browser's default home page, it records a visit every time you open the browser. So if you want the most accurate reading of your site's popularity, make another web site your home page. Like this one! The Maid just loves to see a surge in the stats.