You may have noticed that our WordPress Optimized Hosting plans include an "Estimated Monthly Visits" metric. You might wonder, how are these monthly visits calculated?
This article will guide you through understanding and monitoring your server’s traffic statistics, including unique visits, billable traffic, and non-billable traffic. Keeping track of these statistics is essential to ensure your website operates seamlessly.
What Is a Visit?
When someone or something opens your website from any device (laptop, phone, tablet, server, desktop, etc.) anywhere in the world, that counts as a visit. From the web server’s perspective, each visit uses the same amount of resources, regardless of whether it’s initiated by a human or a bot.
Why Does My Plan Use Visits as a Limitation?
Your website runs on a server with finite hardware and software resources. A server can handle only a certain number of visitors at a time before reaching its capacity, which can cause performance slowdowns. Using visits as a metric helps balance server usage effectively.
Understanding BigScoots Traffic Monitoring in Your WPO Dashboard
The steps below will guide you on how to view the traffic statistics.
Step #1:
Login to your Bigscoots WPO Portal and go to Dashboard.
Step #2:
On your Dashboard, you can view traffic stats, which reflect your visit metrics as determined by the web server logs.
From there, you can click the dropdown to see the individual traffic stats for the website (marked by green arrows in the screenshot), or click the primary domain of your WPO plan to view the server's stats (marked in blue).
How Monthly Visits Are Calculated
Every time a unique session interacts with your server, it uses resources, whether initiated by a bot or a human.
For example:
Day 1: A user visits your site and is counted as one unique session.
Day 2: The same user visits again after 24 hours, resulting in a second unique session.
You can also view per-day requests by hovering on the graph.
Billable vs. Non-Billable Traffic
We determine traffic metrics and the distinction between billable and non-billable traffic based on unique visits and the number of requests.
Unique Visits track the number of individual users who visit your site, whereas Requests count every action or request made by those users, including multiple actions during a single visit.
Billable Traffic:
Billable traffic includes human traffic as well as unknown bots. This reflects regular interactions with your site and is the core metric for determining your hosting plan.
Unique Visits: Distinct users who access your site, excluding bad and malicious bots. Includes human users and unidentified bots.
Unknown Bot Requests: Any bots that are unidentified and not present as bad bots in our list are also counted as billable requests.
Note: Bots commonly mask themselves as human traffic, so there isn't a way for us to identify all Unknown Bot Requests. We continuously update our list of bad bots IPs, referrers, and other signatures to ensure accurate tracking.
Non-Billable Traffic:
Non-billable traffic consists of known bots and crawlers, which do not qualify as legitimate visits. These can include:
Good Bot Requests: Beneficial crawlers like Googlebot, Yahoo, Bing, and others that index your site responsibly, improving visibility in search engines.
Bad Bot Requests: Non-malicious crawlers that excessively visit your site.
Malicious Requests: These are the requests with harmful intent, designed to exploit vulnerabilities, scrape content, or perform other damaging activities on your site.
Non-billable traffic impacts server performance but does not count toward your plan’s visit limits.
While it is impossible to block all bots, if the bot visits affect your website or server's performance, you can reach out, and our team can block a good majority.
While tools like Google Analytics or Cloudflare may show different visitor numbers, the WPO dashboard focuses on server resource usage, ensuring hosting decisions are based on actual demand. This is why the numbers may differ from tools like Google Analytics or Cloudflare.
Understanding Traffic Metrics: Google Analytics, Cloudflare, and BigScoots
The most preferred analytical tool around, Google Analytics, is utilized by most website owners to understand their website traffic and other data. Here's why the numbers can vary significantly between them and BigScoots' WPO Dashboard.
Google Analytics:
Google Analytics focuses on visitors from a marketing perspective, excluding bots, spammers, and other automated traffic through "Known bot-traffic exclusion." Since bots comprise over 40% of internet traffic, this exclusion means Google Analytics will always show fewer visits than BigScoots and Cloudflare. Additionally, ad blockers can prevent Google Analytics scripts from tracking visitors, further lowering its numbers.
Understanding Cloudflare Web Analytics:
Cloudflare tracks all traffic passing through its proxied DNS records, counting both bots and humans. Unlike other tools, it also includes partial content requests, such as those made by APIs, plugins, or RSS feeds, which can inflate visit counts. This approach often results in traffic numbers 2–3 times higher than Google Analytics.
While Cloudflare provides a detailed overview of all traffic hitting your site, its focus is on resource usage and bandwidth, making it less suited for marketing analysis.
BigScoots WPO Dashboard:
BigScoots provides a comprehensive view of the traffic hitting your server, including all resource-consuming visits. Unlike Google Analytics, BigScoots tracks both bots and humans to assess server usage and determine the appropriate hosting plan.
Conclusion:
Each tool—Google Analytics, Cloudflare, and BigScoots—offers unique insights. Google focuses on marketing traffic, Cloudflare tracks all requests, and BigScoots measures server resource consumption. By reviewing data across all platforms, you can better understand your website's performance while ensuring your BigScoots plan aligns with actual usage.