These version zero site (.fr) statistics are provided as standard by Infomaniak, the site host.
More than 150 unique visitors on 15 and 16/09 when I thought I was the only user of the site?
The site (.fr) has been referenced and under construction online since 11/09 and on 16/09 contained only a dozen articles located on a single page, most of which were still empty.
Apart from the site editor, what can other visitors do on this site that is under construction and almost empty?
Let’s say it’s the number of pages displayed by the site’s server between 11/09 and 30/09, depending on the time of day (UTC time a priori).
For example, between 18:00 and 19:00, more than 1200 pages were viewed during this period.
So in twenty days that’s an average of 60 pages per hour in that time slot.
What pages are they?
The three most visited (or requested?) pages belong to the WordPress application.
Two of them are pages that return the names of the users of the site (public default data for sites developed with WordPress!)
The third page is the style sheet for a font.
It is difficult to say whether this traffic is that of the publisher or that of visitors-robots in the service of petty criminals…
By the way, where does the site’s traffic come from?
Almost two thirds of the traffic (hits) comes from direct access, i.e. access by typing the address of the site in the address bar of a browser or by clicking on a bookmark that stores the address, or from a link in an e-mail or a document.
The site editor himself has made a number of such requests, since in testing the e-book and the alpha site he routinely accesses articles on the site from the links that reference them in the e-book, or from the bookmarks of his web browser.
How much of the 12,843 hits could he have caused himself in twenty days?
No idea.
Almost two thirds of the remaining traffic comes from internal site bounces. Is the publisher the main driver?
No evidence at this stage.
In the details of the remaining traffic sources (category Others), we find the main robots of the search engines Baidu, Google… Their names are mentioned because they appear in clear in the source addresses.
Since by default the site editor refuses to use IP addresses to try to identify the origin of traffic, we will leave it at that after the following two maps.
The total number of hits is not available, as most hits are not geolocated.
The Network (net) and Commercial (com) categories refer a priori to traffic passing through Internet Service Providers (ISPs) whose names end in .net and .com. These providers cannot be associated with a particular country as they are international.
The site is hosted in Switzerland (Infomaniak). So we can assume that most of the hits coming from the WordPress instance installed on the site, go through a Swiss ISP (?)
In this case, this gives a limit of 1000 hits for site editing work with WordPress, or at most a quarter of the hits from this application according to the Traffic Sources figures presented above.
Does this mean that other hits on WordPress pages come from visitors outside Switzerland?
15 hits from France seems low considering that the publisher was testing the e-book links to the .fr site from France and initiated all its development sessions from France.
To try to answer these questions, let’s use, exceptionally, the IP address of the publisher (he accepts because he believes that it does not harm him in this case).
IP addresses are blurred to protect users. The first line corresponds to the IP address of the site editor. The last line corresponds to one of Google’s web-crawlers.
These figures validate the macro hypothesis made above (less than 1,000 hits for the site’s publishing activity in September 2020).
Compare to the rest of the attendance statistics
37 visits for the publisher. It is hard to imagine what the other visits are for at this stage. First contacts, probably. It’s pretty clear what a web-crawler is doing. For the others…
About one third of the hits are due to publishing activities.
About one third of the file traffic on the server is related to editing activity.
Publishing activity generated just under two-thirds of the data exchanged with the server (.fr) in September 2020.
Other statistics in 2020: