Difference between 'hits' and 'visits'

An important question I was asked recently from a client was about his website log: "What is the difference between hits and visits?" There is a specific technical difference. Here goes...


The technical definition of a hit is each file sent to a browser by a web server. And the technical definition of a visit is each time a visitor views a webpage on your site, irrespective of how many hits are generated. This is not a visit to a site but a visit to an individual page within the site.


Pages are comprised of files. Every image in a page is a separate file. When a visitor looks at a page (i.e. a page view), they may see numerous images, graphics, pictures etc. and generate multiple hits. For example, if you have a page with 10 pictures, then a request to a server to view that page generates 11 hits (10 for the pictures, and one for the html file). A page view can contain hundreds of hits. This is the reason to check the page views and not hits.


Additionally, there is a high potential for confusion here, because there are two types of 'hits'. These are the hits recorded by log files, and interpreted by log analysis. A second type of 'hits' are counted and displayed by a simple hit counter. Hit counters record one hit for every time a webpage is viewed, also problematic because it does not distinguish unique visitors.


So this is why hits are not a reliable way to measure website traffic, the number of visits is what you are interested in.


So hits include all elements that make up your page: animation, images and the html itself. Whereas visits are the page as a whole.


I hope this helps.

The Disability Discrimination Act AA standard

As I understand it if a web site complies with the Web Content Accessibility Initiative Guidelines (WAI) as laid down by the World Wide Web Consortium then it’s generally regarded as being also compliant with the DDA legislation, this is however not defined in the legislation. The WAI does have an AA standard. Also compliance with the guidelines is not something that can be definitively tested. Our stance here is as follows :-

1. We test sites using the Cynthia Says online tool.

2. We generally work to get compliance to the WAI A standard , which is slightly lower, rather than the AA standard. Our advice to customers is that the A standard means that the site will work fine for the majority of disabled people and that unless a fairly large proportion of their potential clients are disabled or their site is specifically aimed at disabled people, then the extra compliance levels aren’t really necessary.

3. We can build a site to the AA standard.