Which hit counter?

Bravenet.com has a pretty decent one.

Google has its own free hit counter/analysis package (Google Analytics). I don't use it, but I've heard it's pretty good.

Personally I quit using these image/script based counters a long time ago because they aren't really very accurate (I was surprised when I got access to a log file analysis on my web host) - these image/script counters might catch a good proportion of users, of course, but in the age of ad blockers and people going paranoid about cookies, I'm not so sure. Who knows, maybe Google has tried to improve them, though.

WWWWolf said:

Google has its own free hit counter/analysis package (Google Analytics). I don't use it, but I've heard it's pretty good.

Click to expand...

That's what I use. Seems to work well.

I like Google Analytics. It works well for me

Do you want a counter to display on your site so your visitors can see how many hits too?

If not, Google Analytics is awesome. It's a really indepth traffic analysis tool that can give you masses of data on your traffic.

Statcounter.com has some decent abilities for free, better ones for a minimal price and superb abilities at a fair price.

I presume you can add HTML to your blog, as that's generally how these counters work. For displaying the hit count on your page, this is one of several free counters used by ebay sellers to put hit counters on their auction pages.

http://www.statcounter.com/

bsolah said:

Do you want a counter to display on your site so your visitors can see how many hits too?

If not, Google Analytics is awesome. It's a really indepth traffic analysis tool that can give you masses of data on your traffic.

Click to expand...

And I might also add that counters that do get displayed on the site don't really add much to any website - they were all the rage in mid-1990s, but a lot of web design gurus started speaking against them. And it's pretty common sense, really - big hit counts impress no one, and small numbers don't really inspire pity or confidence either

You probably want to also choose a counter that's hosted on a reasonably fast host, because people don't want to wait the pages to load too long, especially if the remaining bits are just ads or add-ons that don't help the user (like counters). Another point in favour of Google, who generally have pretty fast and reliable web services.

I use Site Meter and Google Analytics. I highly recommend both of these. I've been using Site Meter for at least 4 or 5 years now, and Google Analytics for over a year.