The counter still runs after ten years

Countless websites have integrated a visitor counter years ago and left the code untouched since. During the past decade, web technology has shifted significantly, yet a simple HTML image tag remains universally supported.

Three things changed underneath in that decade, and each of them broke something somewhere. Connections moved to encryption, phones overtook desktops as the usual way of reading a page, and consent banners appeared on almost every commercial site. An image request noticed none of the three.

Encryption is the one that could have stopped the counter, and sometimes did. A page delivered over a secure connection that loads an image over an insecure one either shows a warning or drops the image entirely. The counters still running are the ones whose image address moved to the secure form as well.

What stopped working in the same decade

While mobile browsing has become dominant and privacy regulations have tightened, a pure image-based tally operates independent of these shifts. The original counting mechanism requires no script updates to stay functional.

Plenty did stop. Guest books needed a database and somebody to moderate them. Counters written as small programs needed a runtime that servers eventually stopped offering. Widgets from services that closed leave an empty rectangle behind. An image request has no runtime, no library, and no company behind it that can withdraw it.

When the address changes

When a website is eventually moved to a new domain or a modern content management system, the recorded history is preserved as long as the exact same snippet is carried over. The legacy of a decade remains intact without technical friction.

The failure that does occur after a move is quieter than a broken counter. The tally keeps climbing, correctly, but the statistics page still lists the old domain, because the domain was recorded at the moment each hit arrived. Nothing is lost; the label is simply out of date.

That distinction is worth holding on to. The number hangs on the identifier inside the image tag, not on the domain name around it. A wrong label beside a correct number is an inconvenience. A changed identifier would be a loss, and that is the one thing a move must not touch.

In practice that leaves one thing to check after a move: open the page, then open the image address on its own, and see that the picture arrives. If it does, the total is intact. If it does not, the address was rewritten somewhere during the transfer, and the old one still exists to be restored.

Still working, as a feature

After ten years the sentence stops being modest. Most of what a site of that age was built with has been replaced at least once — the server software, the database, often the whole publishing system. A mechanism that survived all of it without a single edit has earned the description. The counter is not remarkable because it counts; it is remarkable because nothing ever had to be done to it.