Counting Visits
Kinsta’s hosting plans are based on the total number of monthly visits to your sites on the server. The number of visits in a given month is the sum of the unique IP addresses seen each 24-hour period as recorded in the Nginx logs. These visits are shared across your WordPress Hosting plan. We use this data to approximate your resource usage.
What is a visit?
Kinsta records the exact number of visits to your WordPress sites that occur directly on the web server. We do not count visits from most well-known “bot” user agents and do our best to filter them out of our analytics data. This also includes API calls, search engine crawlers, uptime bots, etc. If we identify something trying to brute force “wp-login.php,” we ban it from our infrastructure.
You can see a summary of the visits in the MyKinsta analytics “Resource Usage” report and can currently filter it by the previous 24 hours, 7 days, or 30 days.
The chart is fully dynamic and includes additional drill-down details. For example, if you highlight a specific point in time on the graph, it shows you some comparison statistics, such as the total number of visitors being higher than the previous day, etc.
Full log data regarding analytics is retained for 30 days. Visits are shared across your plan; if you are worried about going over your plan visits limit, we suggest checking the dashboard and analytics section for all of your sites more frequently after first migrating to Kinsta.
If you see an unexplained traffic spike or inconsistency, contact our Support team, and we can further investigate the logs to help determine the cause.
What generates a visit and what doesn’t
Here are a few examples of each:
- When someone loads a page of your site, this counts as a visit.
- If that person then goes to another page of your site, this is still considered one visit.
- A visit to any environment (Live, Standard Staging, or Premium Staging) counts as a visit in your WordPress analytics.
- Only visits to the live environment are counted in your plan usage (shown at the top of your Company-level Analytics page and in the WordPress analytics section of your Dashboard page).
- If someone uses two different browsers on the same computer (or network) to view your site, it’s treated as one visit because the IP address is the same. This is also why every visit in a day from the same location is considered one visit no matter how many devices were used. As long as the same internet connection with the same IP address is used on the same day, it’s one visit.
- If someone visits your site from their workplace (outside of their home) and then again from their home, these are counted as separate visits because two different IP addresses are used.
- Visits from most well-known “bot” user agents are not counted as visits, and we do our best to filter those out.
- Requests that return a 403 error are not counted as visits.
Kinsta visitor counts and other analytics tools
It’s important to understand that third-party analytics tools might show something different from what we have calculated. This is due to the fact that every analytics tool uses a different set of data as the basis for their calculations and may or may not implement their own logic to attempt to show you the total number of real human visitors, after having filtered out bots and crawlers.
All tools also show different numbers based on the data they have collected and their own set of rules—what they consider to be irrelevant bot traffic and what they consider to be legitimate traffic.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics works by adding JavaScript to your site, which runs in each site visitor’s browser to gather data. This can be set up manually, or using a Google Analytics WordPress plugin. It calculates the number of users and sessions using the data gathered from visitor browsers. Google Analytics is designed to show you only human visitors by filtering out bots and tracking visitors across devices and through network changes (such as when a visitor’s IP changes).
According to PageFair, there were over 290 million active users of desktop adblocking in 2022, and this number continues to grow. Most ad blockers blacklist www.google-analytics.com and block the analytics JavaScript library from sending data back to Google’s servers. And those that don’t blacklist Google Analytics by default still allow you to block it with a click of a button.
This means that in most scenarios, Google Analytics can’t count visitors who are using ad blockers. But these visits are still counted at Kinsta due to the fact that we are looking at visits to the server.
Google Analytics does not generate any value that is directly comparable to our visit count. Therefore, we do not recommend using Google Analytics data as the basis for your estimate of monthly visits.
Cloudflare Analytics
Cloudflare Analytics provides details about how many visitors hit your site. To access it, log in to your Cloudflare dashboard and select Websites > site name> Analytics & Logs > Unique Visitors.
Cloudflare shows unique visitors for the entire time frame you choose. This means if you choose a weekly view, the data points will show daily unique visitors, but the weekly visitor count at the top of the chart will count unique visitors throughout the whole week, regardless of how many times they visited the domain on a daily basis.
To properly compare Cloudflare’s visitors to Kinsta, you can either add up the daily visitors individually or pick a single day, let that be the average, and multiply it. Let’s use the screenshot above as an example. When we total up the daily visitors (78 + 83 + 63 + 39 + 73 + 79 + 55) they actually add up to 470. This is how to get the total that will be closer to what you see in Kinsta. Our numbers aren’t higher than Cloudflare, but we do use a different calculation method.
Suggested reading: How to Set up Cloudflare APO for WordPress.
Server statistics
There are many other server statistics packages available on the market today, one of which may be installed on your current server. If you have access to statistics on your current server, you can probably locate information allowing you to estimate visits with a large degree of accuracy.
The key here is to understand how the server statistics package on your current server counts visits and how that compares to how Kinsta counts visits.
In this article, we’ve already explained how we count visits. You may also need to do a little research to understand how the statistics package on your current server counts visits. Once you’ve done that, you can use the statistics on your current server to create an informed estimate of what visits will look like on our platform.
AWStats is one such program that is included by many web hosts who use cPanel. If you have access to AWStats, their “visits” count is similar to our visits calculation and should provide a reasonable estimate of visits for the purposes of sizing a hosting plan.
To find this data, log in to cPanel, click Awstats from within the Metrics section, and look for the total in the “Number of visits” column.
Bots and discrepancy in analytics
When a bot visits your site, it may or may not be counted as a visit.
We do not count visits from most well-known “bot” user-agents and do our best to filter them out of our analytics data. This also includes API calls, search engine crawlers, uptime bots, etc. If we identify something trying to brute force “wp-login.php,” we ban it from our infrastructure.
However, bots have also been known to spoof user agents, in which case they might appear legitimate in our access logs but don’t show up in Google Analytics or other tools that rely on JavaScript running in the visitor’s browser. Because of this, it is normal for there to be a discrepancy between the total visits we show and another tool, especially if that tool relies on JavaScript running in the browser.
Bot traffic requires server resources (RAM/CPU/bandwidth), as such, some bots might be included in your total visits count since our servers still have to serve those visitors. We exclude properly identified bot traffic as a courtesy, but ultimately, bot traffic takes just as much work for our servers as human traffic.
If you are struggling with a large discrepancy or excessive bot traffic, we recommend implementing a web application firewall (WAF) from a reputable security solution provider such as Cloudflare or Sucuri. These services have extensive databases of what should be treated as “bad” traffic and traffic from these “bad” IP addresses is prevented from ever hitting your Kinsta site. Many of our clients see much less of a discrepancy between our analytics and what Google Analytics and other tools report after utilizing one of these services. This can, in turn, save you money by limiting the size of the hosting plan needed for your site.
Our Kinsta support team can also add additional IP or User-Agent banning rules. For example, if you need to deny a specific User-Agent or IP address, share that information with our support team, who will add a rule blocking that traffic source from your site. Due to how our infrastructure works, this should be done at the server-level and not with a WordPress plugin. Please open up a ticket if you need assistance.
Summary
In conclusion, every analytics program or package generates analytics using its own data set and calculation methodology. At Kinsta, our count of visits is based on the raw access logs, tracking the IP addresses that request resources from your websites and excluding known bots.
Because every program uses its own data and methodology, we cannot guarantee a perfect match between our analytics and those generated by another program. However, if you have access to another analytics program that uses server access logs to count up unique user IP addresses (such as Cloudflare or AWStats), that information can be used to estimate how many visits your sites will receive when hosted at Kinsta.