A web counter is a type of special script that sits on your webpage and monitors how many people visit your website. Counters can be extremely simple (only counting the number of people who visit) or very complex (counting visitors, looking at what city and state they are coming from, recording their IP addresses and so forth), depending on how much work you want to put into them. Before you build a web counter, you should check with your hosting company and see if it offers web counting code that you can use without having to write any.

Create a Web Counter with PHP

For the ultimate level of privacy, detail and control over your web counter, you can program your own web counter with a web programing language like PHP. Doing this requires that you have at least an intermediate level of understanding of PHP and MySQL so that you can create a small script that will capture and log details about your website visitors to a database. If you program a script like this, you'll be able to add many features to it that may not be available from a normal free script, and you'll also gain some inside knowledge about how web counters work on a technical level.

Create a Web Counter with FrontPage

Microsoft FrontPage, a popular web design program, enables you to create your own web counter that will integrate into your website. FrontPage includes this feature automatically, and more can be learned about it by viewing the FrontPage help files inside of the program. Your web host must support FrontPage Extensions, something that not all web hosts offer. If yours does, though, you can use FrontPage to create your own web counter.

Use a Premade Web Counter

If you aren't interested in learning how to code or messing around with FrontPage, you can use a free web counter provided by Google to track your visitors. Google Analytics is a service offered by Google that provides you with detailed statistics about the visitors to your website, including things like how long they stayed, which pages on your site they visited and so on. You can also search the web for a free counter, as many scripts are available that will let you set up your own web counter free.

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How to Create a Counter on Your Web Page