Why does HCF discourage the use of hit counters on websites?
In the web design world, ‘hit’ counters are considered amateur. Furthermore, they do not even do an accurate job of counting unique users to your site. This is because they do not distinguish between new and returning visitors. A visitor can simply press ‘refresh’ 20 times and your hit counter increments each time. So, even though you only had one user to your site, your counter will show 20 hits. Yes, there are ways to write complex code to distinguish between new and returning users to your site, but the overhead simply is not worth the effort. To look at a report of activity on the Humanities server, see this link.
