Traffic, or web traffic, refers to the number of users who visit a website over a period of time. It represents the volume and flow of visitors interacting with a site’s webpages and provides insight into the site's popularity, engagement, and online presence.
When users visit a website, their device communicates with an external web server that sends the necessary files to the user’s browser. These files include HTML, CSS, JavaScript, text, images, and other multimedia content, which the browser interprets and combines to present a webpage. Each file equals a hit — as a result, a single page can generate multiple hits depending on the files required to render the page.
Tracking web traffic allows businesses and web developers to assess various metrics, such as the number of unique visitors, page views, and hits over a specific period. These insights reveal the level of user engagement, the popularity of particular web pages, and problems in the user journey, such as slow load times. These metrics allow developers to improve the user experience.
