Why the exclusion list is not hashed
If you build a site, you open it twenty times a day. On a counter with forty visitors a month, half the statistics are you. So there is a setting: do not count visits from my own address.…
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 counter for your page
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…
Your counter on an HTTPS page
Your site is on HTTPS. Your visitors see a padlock. Then you paste in something from another site, and the padlock goes away — or the thing you pasted simply does not appear. That is mixed…
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…
Your counter has been counting robots
Your counter has been counting robots. So has everybody's. Until this month nobody here could tell you how many, because nothing was measuring it — and a crawler that requests a counter…
A counter or an analytics suite?
The honest answer to the question in the title is: it depends what you are asking your statistics to tell you. A visitor counter and a full analytics suite are not two grades of the same…
Counting without a cookie
A visitor counter has one awkward job: it has to tell two visits apart. If it cannot, then one person reloading a page ten times looks like ten people, and the number on your site is…