Front Page Hits?

You have most likely noticed that every page of the site displays a number with "front page hits" under it.

This number is exactly what it says: it's the number of visits to the main page of the site - the news page, in other words. The number on the counter does not rise if you view any other page of the site.

But why would I do that? Why don't I put my unique visitor counter up there, or at least count the hits on every page, instead of bizarrely just counting one page?

Well, the main reason is history. When I first got a hit counter, it was before the time I started including the menu and such on every page of the site, and it just didn't occur to me to manually put the hit counter script on every page - I just placed it on the one page that seemed most logical to count on, which was the front page. When I did start to include the menu and everything on every page, I thought it was a bit odd to take a counter that had only been counting pageviews on one page and suddenly start making it count pageviews on all the pages, so I specially decided to keep it only on the front page.

Regardless, I don't think front page hits are too unreasonable a thing to count. They're biased in favor of regular visitors who keep checking back and against people who pop in from a search result and leave immediately - in other words, in favor of visitor loyalty. I'm thrilled to measure that alongside more traditional web analytics.

Page last modified August 13 2016 at 02:34 UTC

Comments

No comments on this page as of yet.

Post comment

Name

E-mail

Website address

Website name

Comments

Please type the name of the above Pokémon into this box: Fun fact: The above sprite has a 1/8192 chance of being shiny. Feel free to brag if you get one.