Date First Published: 2nd September 2022
Topic: Web Design & Development
Subtopic: Web Development
Article Type: Computer Terms & Definitions
Difficulty: MediumDifficulty Level: 6/10
Learn more about what a hit is in this article.
On a web server, a hit is a request to a file or a resource. It could be a HTML file, image, JavaScript file, CSS file, video, or anything else. For example, if a visitor loaded a single HTML page which contained seven images, two CSS files, and three JavaScript files, it would generate a total of 12 hits. If 1000 visitors loaded that HTML page, it would generate a total of 12000 hits.
Loading a single page does not usually generate a single hit as pages often include links to other resources or files. Some hosting providers, especially free ones, may put a limit on the daily amount of hits a website can generate per day, week, or month, although a hits limit is quite rare and they often limit other server resources, such as monthly bandwidth.
Hits can vary based on the number of resources a page loads, so hits are rarely used to measure website traffic. Instead, website owners often focus on other measurements, such as unique visitors and page views.
The term 'hits' is often incorrectly used to mean page views or the number of people that access a specific website. Page views are not the same thing as hits. Hits measure the total number of files downloaded from a web server and page views measure the number of times visitors view webpages, regardless of the number of files downloaded from a web server. Both visits and hits are important measurements. However, page views are a more important measurement because it provides information about the people visiting a site. Hits provide information about the total number of files downloaded, whilst page views provide information about the total number of visitors to a website.
Both hits and page views can be used to check the performance of a website by calculating the hits-to-visits ratio. Hits are almost always higher than page views, often with a ratio of more than 10 to 1. A very high hits usage indicates that pages have a lot of additional files that needed to be loaded to render a page, whilst a high amount of page views indicates that a website is popular. Combining CSS and JavaScript into HTML pages and using a website caching service can reduce the number of website hits.
Page views and unique page views are different measurements. Page views measure all views, regardless of how many times the same visitor has visited the page. It would be recorded as one unique visitor. Unique page views are tracked by IP address or a cookie to determine repeated visits.
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