Should I put a site counter on my site?
If you want to impress your mates, yes. If you have a serious site, then no.
Site counters became all the rage understandably, as they gave website owners an opportunity to turn virtual traffic into something more tangible - numbers.
From serving an important need - the need to know how many people are visiting your site - site counters changed to become a status symbol. The perception of your site became intimately linked with that small site counter at the bottom of the page.
In today's world, though, site counters are distinctly unhip for three very pragmatic reasons:
- Firstly, any decent hosting service will provide you with a range of statistics related to visits to your site that make site counters irrelevant. You need to know far more than how many times your site is visited. You need to know information like how many unique visitors you have, what pages are the most popular, where do your visitors come from etc. Your statistics come from server logs, which track ip addresses, times etc of visitors. Most site counters are a simple piece of code which simply adds a 1 to the total each time the page is loaded.
- The second is that, as is obvious to most visitors, site counters can be faked - it's enough to have a program automatically load your page a couple of hundred times a day to see those figures go up, or with some site counters you can set a starting total. So, given that most people are sceptical about the numbers, having a site counter doesn't really make much sense
- The final argument against sitecounters works against the above two points by presuming that a)a site counter gives you the info you need, and b) that the numbers are reliable. If this is the case, you have the problem of longevity to face. If you're just setting up your site now, with a site counter at 0, it's going to take some time before you get impressive numbers - and presuming visitors do take into account a site counter, what will they think of your site while you're building it up?
The Bodu bottom line? Steer clear of site counters, and concentrate on sophisticated statistics software on your server to tell you about your visitors.