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…
What came off the about page, and why
The old about page had a feature list on it. Rebuilding that page meant reading the list line by line against the software, and four entries no longer matched it. One of them had not…
Where the about page numbers come from
There are six numbers across the top of the about page now: people online right now, visitors yesterday, counters in use, countries in the last thirty days, designs to choose from, and the…
The header and footer now run full width
A small change visible on every page here: the dark band at the top and the footer at the bottom now run the full width of the window. Until today they sat inside the same 1180-pixel column…
Page views, daily visitors and the counter total: which number means what?
A counter image, a daily visitor report and a period total can show different numbers without a fault. Before comparing them, check the metric, the time period and the counter number.…
Read referring domains without guessing missing traffic sources
The referring-domain report describes source information that reached Stats4U. It is not a complete list of every route to the website, and a row is not automatically a distinct person.…
Export Stats4U reports as CSV or JSON with the correct access and period
The CSV and JSON links on a statistics page download a report for further work. Start from an accessible statistics page, select the intended period and use its current download link. An…
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,…