Thanks for the great review!
I’m not sure if we will add a Hits metric because this would measure all of the requests, so one pageview could trigger 20+ hits for all of the CSS, JS, and image files. It would create a lot more data to store and our analytics are more centered around visitor behavior, like Google Analytics. Do you use a CDN like Cloudflare? That would give you stats that include hits/requests.
Hi Ben
Currently no. We use Hits to measure 2 issues.
Firstly the website reach and secondly anomalies in website traffic where we could pick up bot and other bad actors.
Webalizer was the only source of this data as even Google Search Console does not provide this information for the entire site (only 1000 keywords are recorded).
Webalizer keeps only 12 months on rolling bases. We have set your plug-in to keep only 2 years which is enough visibility as we export the data to our own files anyway.
This does not detract from the excellent plug-in, and we may be a minority that uses this data anyway.
If this could be added an option you can save the data storage, but also only make it available to people who want it. Just an idea from us.
Regards
Thanks for your notes on this. I think this use case is different from what we want to focus on. Our goal is primarily to help people understand what their visitors are doing on their website. We ignore all bots for this reason to keep the stats focused on human visitors only. Webalizer is interesting because it’s not a visitor analytics tool, but rather, a log file analysis tool. It’s a more technical way to analyze your site and definitely has its own uses. If you are open to trying Cloudflare for your site, I think you’d enjoy the stats that they provide, since they are also log based and great for detecting bot visits.
