What is a Website Hit

A website hit is simply a metric used to record website traffic, and particularly the impact on the server. It's an outdated metric and a popular one from the 90s, often shown directly on the page using a 'hit counter'. Imagine if websites still showed this level of transparency today!

Hit counters were still common during the early noughties. However, the concept (or measurement) of a 'hit' was rather meaningless from a marketing perspective, so over time it's been replaced with more useful measures like pageviews or unique visitors. I say meaningless, when in practice, during its early use, the size of your counter was absolutley something to brag about. A larger number almost gave you authority in the same way as a high-quality backlink, or page-one position on Google, might do today (that is of course, if you still count a page-one posiiton on Google as a sign of authority, when for some that honour is entirly useless).

The main reason for the hit counter being replaced is that it measured every file download required to serve the page. Now, a page like this one you're reading right now - which is text heavy, with no styling (stylesheets), no cookies or JavaScript, and no video or images - would be a single hit per view, becasue we only need to download the HTML file to consume its contents. However, a modern content page explaining this same topic would most likely have all of those things. Each of those items would add '1' hit for every page view. Add multiple images and CSS files and suddenly it doesn't take much for your hit counter to show some 'authority'.

It became a vanity metric, which was fun, but eventually useless. So individuals and businesses turned to something more meaningful: metrics that could help define there position vs competitors, and that could be used towards future strategies. Today, for most websites, that hit counter is still accessibly, often server side, and accurately counts all of the files required for each page visit. Let's get into some of the details to further understand what's going on with a hit.

What are web page hits?

OK, well to start with, 'web page' and 'hit' do not mean the same thing. From a measurment perspective, when you're thinking about a web page, you probably have page visits in mind, or perhaps page views. Which answers the question, 'How many times has my page been visited or seen, and by how many people?'

Whereas a 'hit', as mentioned earlier, refers to the total number of files requested when the page is loaded in your browser - sometimes described as being 'served' by the hosting server, or considered as 'downloaded' so you can see all the page content.

The challeng here, from a marketing and measurment perspective as that the hit count adds up all of these file requests. So images, CSS, videos e.t.c will all count towards the page hit number. If your page loads 10 files, you'll receive 10 hits for each visit. This quickly inflates the hit count number.

You'll see, that a higher hit count doesn't necessarily mean more people.

So, why did we count hits?

This has less to do with marketing metrics, as we know them today, and more to do with server load and bandwidth. A hit is a simple count of log lines recored against server activity. Hosting space in the early days of the internet was more expensive than it is today. A website was usually physically stored on a server, somewhere like a university or in a company rack, and not held 'virtually' in the way most websites are today.

If content was popular and well shared, or spoken about, it might receive a significant number of requests. This could overload the server, and bandwidth limits could be exceeded, effectively taking the site offline. At that point it was temporarily unavailable.

So having a simple access request counter, or 'hit counter', was an effectve way of measuring traffic and spotting when you were heading towards a capacity problem. This is a bad position long term. Short term, it often created excitement and appealed to the developer's ego. You could argue this was one of the first web vanity metrics; it began as a useful server signal, but quickly turned into a number people chased for the sake of the number.