Introduction

Metrics are an important aspect of every business or pretty much any endeavor you embark on. Without metrics, it will be a very arbitrary job for anyone to make decisions and improve their work. Thus, it is important to have reliable tools that track certain aspects of your website, such as how many visitors you have per month. Knowing the visitor's count and access information, in general, is one of the most reliable ways of determining the popularity of your website.

cPanel provides a wide variety of Metrics tools to choose from; however, when it comes to simplicity, one definitely has a great advantage.

In the next few lines of this tutorial, we will review the most simple way of reviewing your website's access rate: the "Visitors" feature in cPanel. Without further ado, let us proceed!

Accessing the Visitors feature in cPanel

Before you can access the "Visitors" feature, you will need to log in to your cPanel service account. 

Once logged in, you will need to locate the "Visitors" feature by either using the Search functionality provided at the top of the page or by looking for the "Metrics" features group, and within it, you will find the "Visitors" feature. 

When you click on the feature's name or icon, cPanel will redirect you to a brand new page dedicated to the "Visitors" feature. 

Reading Visitors log

On the default page for the "Visitors" feature, you will see a table containing all of your domains and subdomains. From that table, you will have to select the domain/subdomain for which you would like to review the visitors' logs.

Please note that each domain will be represented with two entries - one for the http access on the domain and one for the https access. Depending on how your domain name is accessed, please choose the version for which you would like to review the logs. 

To review the visitors' logs, please click on the small magnifying glass icon correspondng to the domain name you want to review the logs for. 

Once you click on the above-mentioned icon, you will notice a new page where all the access information will be displayed. Let's review the available information and further configurations you can perform.

By default, cPanel will present a table section containing the access information. In each row of the table, a single visit will be described and in each column, you will find different information for the specific visit. The available information you can receive is as follows:

• IP - Under this column, you will see the visitor's IP address. 
• URL - Under this column, you will see the address of your website that the visitor has accessed.
• Time - Under this column, you will see the timestamp of the visit.
• Size -Under this column, you will see the size in bytes of the request sent by the visitor.
• Status -Under this column, you will see the HTTP status code returned by the Web Server. 
• Method -Under this column, you will see the HTTP Method (POST/GET) of the request. 
• Protocol -Under this column, you will see the protocol over which the visit was achieved.
• Referring URL -Under this column, you will see the referring URL (if such) that the visit came from.
• User Agent -Under this column, you will see the Web Browser User Agent of your visitor.

As you might have already noticed, not all of the information will be included initially. Therefore it is up to you to configure the table to present the information that you need the most. To achieve that you will have to click on the small cog icon in the upper right corner of the table. 

Then you will be provided with a list of options to choose from. These options are as we have described already the different types of information you can get for a single visit in the table of visits. Please note, that once you check a certain option it will be immediately displayed in the table or removed in case you have unchecked it. 

Additionally, cPanel provides you with the option to refresh the list of visits by using the refresh button located right next to the cog-like button.

Now that you know how to operate with the table of visits, there is one small feature that cPanel also provides you with. The URL of each visit can be clicked. Clicking the URL will redirect you to the page accessed by the visitor allowing you to easily see any page on your website. 

Another great feature of the visits table is the option to search the entries for a specific page. 

Being able to review what is accessed on your website and by whom it is accessed is a very powerful method of analyzing the web traffic on your websites. This can not only help you identify the popularity of your pages but also security threats if, for example, a single IP address is performing constant requests to the login form of your websites which translates into a brute force attack. In case you are facing any difficulties with the "Visitors" feature, please do not hesitate to contact our Technical Support Crew so they can be able to assist you further on the matter.