Why has my website traffic data changed in Website Builder version 7?
The ability to monitor your website traffic is important, which is why we’re always looking for ways to improve the quality of your traffic data. During March and April of 2022, we rolled out changes that impacted how your traffic is calculated. All changes were completed on April 30, 2022.
What’s changing about my traffic data?
Website traffic can be calculated in many ways.
- Previously, website traffic was calculated based on page hits. This approach counted all requests to the web server to display content (such as images or text blocks) on the page. This information can offer insight on the depth of user exploration within your site.
- Going forward, website traffic will be calculated based on page views. A page view is counted every time a page on your website is loaded. For example, if a visitor goes to three pages on your website, that will count as three page views.
- Overall, the total count of page views is usually less than the total count of page hits, since there are multiple page hits per page that is viewed. This is why you will see your traffic data show lower counts after this change is fully deployed.
What’s the reason for this change?
We are moving to a new website cloud infrastructure platform. This will enable us to provide greater security, scalability, and availability for the websites we manage. Traffic will be calculated based on page views, which is a higher quality way to assess traffic.
In addition, we will no longer count pages views generated by bots, which are not real people. While your traffic counts will decrease, rest assured that it does not mean fewer people are visiting your site.
What’s a bot?
A bot (or web crawler or internet bot) is a script that runs automated tasks over the internet. For example, bots regularly check your site for new or updated content to rank you appropriately on search engine results pages.
That’s great for getting your website found, but not so useful in measuring the actual number of people visiting your site.
What will happen to my report?
All your website traffic data, past to future, will be updated so that it is calculated using page views. That way, you can more accurately compare traffic from this month to traffic this same time last year.
You won’t be able to access the previous calculations of website traffic data. All the report data will be updated using this new methodology.
Can I still see the previous website visitor data?
You'll continue to have access to two years of historical site data, recalculated with the new parameters. Data calculated with the old methodology won't be available after this system change, because all previous website data will be processed using this new approach.
How will I know if I’m looking at new data or old data?
Since this migration has already occurred, your website traffic is now calculated based on the new methodology.