Archive for October 19th, 2007

Using Webalizer

Friday, October 19th, 2007

Webalizer is a great program for analysing visitors to your site.

Webalizer can be accessed by logging in to your cPanel web hosting control panel at http://yourdomain.ext:2082 and by clicking on the Webalizer icon about half way down the page. It will also allow you to view independent statistics of any subdomains you currently have on your site as well as SSL pages.

The monthly statistics are broken down into sections. The top section gives a general overview of visitors to your web hosting account, by the hour, day, files per hour and day and KB per day. It also gives hits by responses code which is particularly useful for detecting broken links, ie. a high number of hits with response code 404 (file not found) will indicate a missing file or a broken link.

Webalizer also gives daily and hourly statistics in graphical format and also hits by URL, good for analysing particularly popular URLs. It also gives a breakdown of popular exit and entry pages (good for SEO analysis), as well as popular visitors to your site by hostname and the top 250 referrers. This is also useful as it allows you to analyse where most of your traffic comes from.

One of the most useful functions of Webalizer from an SEO point of view is the search strings. This gives a list of search terms which users have entered into search engines and arrived at your site from. It also gives a list of popular browsers, screen resolutions and countries which allows you to analyse and possibly adapt your site to suit your visitor’s needs better.

Overall webalizer is probably one of the best open source stats programs out there. It comes as standard with every one of our web hosting packages.