Which platforms our counters live on
The last step of adding a counter here has a section called "Where does it go?" — a short paragraph for each platform, explaining where the code belongs. WordPress, WordPress.com, Blogger,…
Six finished features and the way back to them
On 23 August 2026 this site answered 101,461 requests. In all of them, the owner token — the ?t= that unlocks the settings box on a statistics page — appeared exactly zero times. Not…
Visitor statistics without a cookie banner
Most analytics need a consent banner because most analytics store something on the visitor's device: a cookie, an entry in local storage, an identifier that survives until tomorrow. That…
Why the exclusion list is not hashed
Building a site means opening it twenty times a day. On a counter with forty visitors a month, half the statistics are the author. So there is a setting: do not count visits from my own…
A page address longer than its column
On 9 August 2026, twenty counter images failed to render. Not drew wrong, not drew slowly — the visitor got nothing at all where a counter should have been. The cause was a page address…
The number on the badge is not visitors
A recurring question here is why the number printed on the counter image does not match the number in the statistics. Both are correct. They are answers to different questions, and the…
Animated counters without JavaScript
A fair number of the counter designs here move. The number counts itself up, or the panel draws itself in, or something falls into place and settles. None of them use a single line of…
An invisible visitor counter for any website
Not everybody wants a counter on their page. Plenty of people want the numbers and would rather not have a badge in the corner announcing them — a portfolio, a company site, a page where a…
Adding a Stats4U counter with Google Tag Manager
There is a guide to this on the blog from 2015. Its screenshots show a Tag Manager that no longer looks like that, and one of its seven steps — ticking document.write — is no longer needed…
A counter on an HTTPS page
A site is on HTTPS. Visitors see a padlock. Then something from another site gets pasted in, and the padlock goes away — or the pasted thing simply does not appear. That is mixed content,…
A counter for static sites
Static hosting has quietly become the sensible way to put a small site on the internet. GitHub Pages, Codeberg Pages, Neocities, or a folder of files on any cheap host: no database, no…
Counter number one has been running since 2006
The first counter ever created on this site was created on 18 November 2006, at three minutes past eleven at night. It has the ID 1. It counted visitors today. It stands at 703,428, and it…