Creating web page view number tracker?
Hi all, nice to meet you :)
I'd like to know where to start in creating something that tracks how many people has viewed a page, or a website
Googling comes up with way too many tools, rather than how to actually create one yourself
Does anyone know where I could go to create this, and other similar tools? Any sort of starting point would be great :)
8 Replies
There's 2 main ways of tracking that :
- on the server: each time the page is requested, log the request somewhere
- on the client: each time a page is loaded have a bit of js send an event to a logging server
The serverside way is more precise because not blockable by the user, but it is not feasible at scale as it won't work if the page is cached (at any point along its path)
The client side way is less precise (because an adblocker can prevent the call) but it can work in more situations (SPAs, cached MPAs...)
also, doesn't it require consent from the user? (for gdpr or other law's purposes)
Not if you only track "the page was loaded"
But if you add more stuff you might need to
But that's valid for both cases
it's good to have that in mind
Really fair point
I don't want to do anything that a user might be unaware of
That latter one sounds interesting
I was wondering how possible it was to do it in JS
I assumed it was difficult due to the amount of
tools there are for this thing
and like 0 tutorials on making your own
The serverside one, I asume would also use javascript
Serverside uses whatever you have on the server.
As for it being hard to do, usually the number of tools to do something is inversely proportional, the harder it is the less tool exist to do it
That... makes sense
I always thought that rule was based on number of tutorials
Rather than number of tools
But this makes more sense
I'm surprised I could not find any tutorials then
Perhaps I need to learn where to look
Usually for that kind of stuff you don't really find tutorials. You might find guides or usage docs. Tutorials exist for entry level stuff but for more advanced stuff you'll need to read the doc and figure it out yourself because most often even if you find a tuto it won't be applicable to your specific situation. So tool creators don't bother with it
Tldr : tutorials exist for simple stuff, for complex stuff you need to read the doc