One fun and interesting thing to know about your homepage is just how many people have visited it. If you have spent a lot of time on your site, you will want to have some idea of how many people have stumbled upon it. Hit counters can provide you with this information, and some of them may give you even more information, such as what time of the day people are accessing your page, what kind of computer they use, and sometimes even where they are from. All of this information depends on the kind of counter you choose to install.

Please keep in mind, however, that some counters may drastically slow down the loading time of your website. This can become very frustrating for visitors if they have to wait extensive amounts of time to view your content. In your search for a counter, please keep this in mind.

Some terminology you may want to be familiar with as you start looking for counter:

Hit - Each time a person visits your webpage, it is considered a "hit". If the same person presses "refresh" and reloads your page more than once, these will be counted as multiple hits on your counter.

Unique Visitors - You can also many times set your counter to count only unique visitors instead of every hit. This is useful if you do not want the same person to be counted more than once. This is often helpful if you want to get a more accurate picture of how many different people have viewed your page.