AWStats: Unlocking Website Traffic Insights

AWStats is a powerful free tool for statistical analysis of website traffic. The AWStats statistics viewer is enabled by default on our servers and can be easily accessed via the cPanel dashboard.

AWStats is a particularly useful tool for:

• monitoring website growth,
• detecting unusual visits (e.g. sudden spikes in traffic or visits from “robots”),
• better understanding visitor behaviour,
• monitoring errors that may affect the performance of the site.

How do I access AWStats?

To access the AWStats tool, follow these steps:

1. Log in to the cPanel dashboard (login instructions).

2. In the Metrics section, click on Awstats.

3. In the list , find the (sub)domain for which you want to check statistics and click View.

What does AWStats show?

AWStats aggregates the server logs and displays them in a clear way in the form of tables and graphs. The data is broken down by month, and by day, time, IP and other criteria.

Among the most useful data are:

• Unique visitors: the number of unique visitors in a given period.
• Number of visits: total number of visits during a given period.
• Pages, Hits, Bandwidth: the number of pages opened on the site, the number of requests to the server and the amount of data downloaded.
• Monthly history: display of visits by month over time.

• Days of month: view visits by day of the month.
• Days of week: display the number of visits per day of the week.
• Hours: display the visit by hours of the day.

• Locales (countries): display of visits by country of the visitor.
• Hosts (IP addresses): list of IP addresses through which visits to the website were recorded.
• Robots/Spiders visitors: information on visits by search engines and automated robots.
• Visits duration: average time visitors spent on the website.

• File types: display of the types of files that have been downloaded or displayed on the site.
• Downloads: number of downloads of individual files from the server.
• Viewed / Pages-URL (subpages visited): display the number of times each subpage has been viewed.
• Operating Systems: information on the operating systems of the devices from which visitors access the page.
• Browsers: display of the web browsers used by visitors.

• Referrers / Origin: show the origin of traffic – a list of websites, search engines and other sources from which users have visited the website.
• HTTP Status codes (server responses): display HTTP responses that deviate from normal operation, e.g. errors (403, 404, 500), redirects (301, 307) and other special codes.

How can AWStats help you?

AWStats is not just a tool for the curious, it is a useful tool that website owners can use to gain valuable insights into website performance and visitor behaviour. Correct interpretation of the data can help you improve performance, security and user experience.

Based on the data displayed in AWStats, you can:

• Identify traffic from unusual or suspicious sources that could pose a security risk (e.g. robot attacks or excessive traffic from a single IP address);
• Identify when you get the most traffic, allowing you to better time your advertising campaigns, blog posts or other activities;
• optimise your content by quickly seeing which pages attract the most visitors and which ones users tend to leave as soon as they enter;
• detect page errors, such as 404 (page does not exist) or other errors that can degrade the user experience;
• understand the source of traffic, i.e. which websites or search engines visitors are coming from – this can help you assess the success of external links, campaigns or collaborations;
• monitor visitor behaviour over the course of a day, a week or a month, so you can adjust your content or server capacity according to the actual load;
• detect visits from automated tools and search engines (bots, spiders), which is useful for SEO analysis, but also for identifying potential abuse;
• detect the cause of a hosting package overrun – for example, a 508 error may mean that an unusual number of users or automated tools have visited the site in a short period of time;
• monitor data traffic and bandwidth usage, giving you better control over server load and web content availability.

AWStats allows you to actively manage your website, not just observe it, by providing clear, visually transparent and technically detailed information. By regularly analysing the statistics, you can improve your website’s performance, achieve better search engine results and increase your visitors’ satisfaction.

For further assistance, please call us on 059 335 000 or email us at info@neoserv.si.