Traffic on the website and what's so important about it

"Visitors to the site", or let's start from the beginning

We all know that website traffic is the number of people, known as users, who visit the website. The more the better. Are you sure about it? Is each visit a new user? Is a large number of users an immediate success of the website? What should make us happy and what should not about our "guests"?

First of all, let's try to organize the basics.

What do we mean by "website visits"? Most often, we want to display different pages that are part of one website. The site is published on one domain, for example www.mybeautifulsearesort.com. Pages are its parts with unique URLs, for example the Contact page at www.mybeautifulsearesort.com/contact or the Terms & Conditions page at www.mybeautifulsearesort.com/regulamin. The home page is usually the address with only the domain name, i.e. www.mybeautifulsearesort.com. What are "visits" or "website visits"? It is usually a session, i.e. user interactions with the website in one time period. For example, I enter the address www.mybeautifulsearesort.com in my browser, go to this website, read articles, display a page with T&C, send a contact form, and then leave. The time from entry to exit is one session. If I had not closed the MyBeautifulSeaResort tab, but I would have stopped doing anything on it, the session would be automatically closed after 30 minutes without any action. During a session, when I navigate from the home page to other pages of the site, when I open each page, a pageview request is being sent to the website server. Unique pageviews are the number of times a specific URL has been viewed (e.g. www.mybeautifulsearesort.com/contact), regardless of whether it took place during one or more sessions. And now it's clear that not every session is a new user, because if I return to MyBeautifulSeaResort, a new session will start after an hour of break, and I am not a new user, but a returning user.

Why do we need all these terms? They sound a bit technical, maybe not very natural at first, but they allow you to organize the vocabulary with which we describe activities on the Internet. Thanks to them, we can all accurately describe the phenomena we are talking about and ask questions in a clear way to understand each other. I will add new, "professional" terms from time to time.

Large and small traffic – what does it mean

Let's assume that MyBeautifulSeaResort received a lot of sessions during the last week. The website is fresh, but the owner, Blogger, has linked it to several Facebook groups, his Instagram profile, and LinkedIn and it looks like people have started to keep coming. Blogger noted that from ten sessions in the first days, traffic jumped to nearly a hundred sessions the following week. Should he already be satisfied, because his blog has achieved immediate success and thousands of new users are getting ready to enter the Resort?

The joy is undeniable, but the work has only begun. Users came from various sources to see the new blog, but now he has to check if they just dropped by for a moment or actually viewed more pages in one session.

Did the session last more than one minute?

Which page was the exit one and which one did they visit most often?

And did they come back during these days or are all users only one-time visitors?