How to View your Website Traffic Statistics

Yeah, you get to check your WordPress site traffic statistics! When you get your WordPress site hosted with us, we send you details on how to access the server control panel AWstats report so that you can see what traffic your site has been getting.

The same access is allowed when we design html/CSS websites, and those clients host their sites with us too.

Generally, site hosting packages come with access to the server control panel so that you can see what traffic your site has been getting, so if you want access, and your host has not mentioned that you can access your server control panel to view traffic statistics, enquire about it.

Perhaps some site hosting service providers, or web designers, may not be keen to give you access because if you don’t follow steps to view your site’s traffic stats, exactly, and you start exploring other areas of the control panel, you may mess something up. It’s not nice for a web designer or site hosting service provider to be begged to quickly fix up the mess, when it’s you that made the mess, even if you are happy to pay for the fix.

Some hosting service providers or web designers may charge you a monthly fee to send you the results rather, or perhaps it’s even included in the package price (that they send you the traffic stats once a month.)

You can, of course, use a variety of other online tools to check stats yourself. There’s Google Analytics, for one. You can also get a hit counter to add to your WordPress site, or even use a flag counter to see which countries are visiting your site.

You can also join some blog aggregator sites, some of which include giving you great stats on your site’s traffic.

With us, when we send you the email to tell you that your WordPress site is ready for you to just log in and start adding your pages and posts, we also attach a document to the email that tells you how you can access your server control panel so that you can view your site’s traffic stats.

That document looks something like this:

How to view your website traffic statistics:

*****the client’s site’s name goes in here .co.za****

Control Panel access instructions for:
http://[the site's name again].co.za

IMPORTANT NOTE:
DO NOT use the control panel for anything other than viewing your site’s stats, as you may mess up other settings, and we will charge you to repair them.

Steps:

1.
To access the control Panel, use the link below.
[here we give the link to click or copy and paste into your browser bar]

2.
When accessing the Control Panel you may be warned that the site is not secure. Ignore this, and proceed to the page, by clicking on: “Continue to this website (not recommended).”

3.
Log in using the following information:
Username: [the username goes here]
Password: [the password goes here]

4.
Click the Login button

5.
When you are in the Control Panel, on the top left, you will see “Virtualmin” and “Webmin”. Click on the “Webmin” option

6.
Then click on “Servers”

7.
In the dropdown, click “AWstats Reporting”

8.
Then, on top right corner, you will see “Report”, with the words “View” and “Config” beneath it. Click “View”.

9.
You will now be able to view a very comprehensive statistical report of your website traffic.

10.
When your viewing is complete, in the left panel, at the bottom, see a red circular marker, with the words ”log out” appearing next to it. Click on log out, to log out.

That’s the info we send our WordPress Site package clients – they don’t have to use this method to check traffic stats, but they can if they want to – and hopefully they go through the steps carefully, so that they do not go into other areas of the server control panel.

AWstats report(with our hosting packages) has excellent info on your site’s traffic. The stats include:

unique visitors,

number of visits,

amount of pages viewed,

which countries your visitors are from (and how many of each country),

length of time visitors stayed on your site (how many stayed for 0 – 30 seconds, how many stayed for 30 seconds – 2 minutes, etc etc,

which pages of your site were viewed (you can see which is the most visited page, second most visted page etc, and how many times it was viewed etc)

you can see which method was used for people to get to your site eg
1) from a bookmark/direct address typed into a browser bar/link in an emal
2) from a link on a Search Engine
3) from a link on another site, and what sites/pages those links are on

you can see which search phrases were used that brought up your site’s (or a specific page’s) description and link in search engine results (then was clicked to take a person to your site or page on your site)

- for example, in February 2011, 1661 different search phrases were used on a search engine by people who then clicked through to our 1pic4twenty site (which also has 4 WordPress blogs attached to it.) This generally means that people were/are finding us in search engine results on page one or two of for eg Google. 85 visits to our site came from the search phrase “work from home ideas.” 66 visits to our site came from the search phrase “free photography ebooks.”

© copyright Teresa Schultz 2011