Counting the number of hits each day, many website owners often presume that their site is getting a good number of visitors. This happens by not taking into consideration the vast difference between website hits and website visits. Though, both these terms are related to website traffic, there is a huge difference between the two. Knowing this difference is essential since this confusion might mislead you to a great extent regarding the online promotion of your website or the success of your online business.

Website Hit

Every time a file is requested from your web server by a web browser like Firefox or Internet Explorer, it is recorded as a website hit. The file requested can be anything from an image to a banner advertisement to the page of a text or a part of JavaScript.

Most web pages consist of many files. For example, the page opened before you may have been produced from HTML file, along with some other files that contain side menu, copyright message, and graphic file and so on. So, when the Internet user visits this page, there are several other hits that are produced by him / her.

Website Visit

On the flip side of website hit, is the term ‘visit’. This is basically the number of times your website has actually been clicked by users and browsed by them, irrespective of the number of files that have been downloaded during that browsing session. So, when you visit a page, it counts to only one visit in the web logs of the site owner. This is the reason why the number of hits amount to be more than visits.

While one can consider the figures of hits on the site as the figures for website visit, this is unfortunately a misleading figure. The right way to measure website traffic or to recognize the personal impact or trends of a website is to track down the number of visits received by that site. On the other hand, when you are looking forward to high activity numbers or marketing, hits should be the criterion kept for consideration.

Artificial inflation is another major difference that can be cited between website hits and visits. Hits can be increased anytime by the website owner by adding a few more graphics, pages or texts to his/her website since it depends on the manner your website has been designed. But this does not stand true in case of visits, as there is no artificial way in which you can increase the number of visits to your site, apart from using white hat SEO techniques.

A unique visitor is one who visits your site more than once a day, and a repeat visitor is the one who visits the website a second time, irrespective of the time gap in between.

This record is maintained on the basis of the Internet Protocol (IP) address of the visitor. While the number of website hits is not of much importance, tracking the number of visitors, and figuring out whether they are unique visitors or repeat visitors is of great help since it assists website owners in analyzing the trends of the users, i.e. the way they browse the website. This helps the website owner arrange the content accordingly, to ensure more visits in future.

If you want to know the right number of people who actually view your site, and to figure out the popularity of your website, it is always the visits and not the website hits that you should count upon.