cPanel includes several built-in tools for viewing your website traffic statistics. This guide explains where to find them, what each one shows, and how to get the most accurate picture of your visitors.
Finding your statistics in cPanel
- Log in to cPanel.
- Scroll to the Metrics section.
- You will find several statistics tools available:
| Tool | What it shows |
|---|---|
| Visitors | A quick at-a-glance summary of recent visitor activity |
| AWStats | Detailed graphical reports, visitors, bandwidth, search keywords, countries, and more |
| Webalizer | An alternative graphical stats view, simpler than AWStats |
| Analog Stats | A lightweight text-based report |
| Raw Access | Download the raw server log files for your own analysis |
| Bandwidth | A breakdown of bandwidth usage by domain and service |
For most purposes, AWStats gives the most useful breakdown. Click on AWStats, then select your domain from the list to view its report.
Understanding your AWStats report
AWStats processes your server's access logs and presents the data graphically. The key metrics at the top of the report are:
| Metric | What it means |
|---|---|
| Unique visitors | Individual visitors identified by IP address during the reporting period |
| Visits | Total sessions, one visitor can generate multiple visits if they return after a gap |
| Pages | HTML page requests only, does not include images, stylesheets, or scripts |
| Hits | Every single request to your server, including all images, CSS, JavaScript files etc. |
| Bandwidth | Total data transferred to and from your site |
Scrolling further down the report you will find breakdowns by country, operating system, browser, referring site, search keywords, and which pages on your site were most visited.
AWStats updates every 24 hours. The report does not show today's traffic in real time, it reflects activity up to the previous day's log processing. For more current data, use the Visitors tool in the Metrics section which refreshes more frequently.
Why AWStats numbers may look higher than expected
AWStats counts every request that reaches your server, including requests from search engine crawlers (Googlebot, Bingbot, and others). These bots can account for a significant portion of your reported visits, particularly on new or recently relaunched sites.
Scroll down to the Robots/Spiders visitors section of the AWStats report to see how much of your traffic is bot-generated. Subtract this from your total visits to get a closer approximation of real human visitors.
Getting more accurate visitor data with Google Analytics
For a more reliable picture of your actual human visitors, Google Analytics (GA4) is a better tool than AWStats. Unlike server-side stats, Google Analytics only counts visitors whose browsers successfully load and execute the tracking code, bots and crawlers are largely excluded.
Google Analytics also gives you far more detail: time on page, conversion tracking, user journeys, device types, and real-time visitor counts.
To add Google Analytics to your site:
- WordPress sites: Install the Site Kit by Google plugin (free, official Google plugin). It connects your site to Google Analytics, Search Console, and PageSpeed Insights in a few clicks. Find it by searching "Site Kit" in your WordPress plugin directory.
- Non-WordPress sites: Sign up at analytics.google.com, create a property for your domain, and paste the provided tracking snippet into the
<head>section of every page you want to track.
Google Analytics is free and recommended for any site where understanding visitor behaviour matters.
