Analytics

Voice Online Communities includes a built-in analytics tool that gives you real-time insight into traffic across your website. It tracks visits, browser and device types, referral sources, language, location, and screen resolution. You can refresh the page at any time to see the most up-to-date figures.

Unlike many analytics solutions, it is cookieless and GDPR-compliant, and does not record visitor IP addresses. It also supports campaign tracking via standard UTM URL parameters, so you can measure the effectiveness of links shared through social media, email newsletters, or other marketing channels.

For more information see the Analytics help page.

Site Statistics

Site Statistics are generated nightly from your web server logs using AWStats, and give a detailed breakdown of traffic to your site. You can browse results by month or by year, going back to when your site was created. The categories available include most-visited pages, time-of-day patterns, referring sites, and much more. A full list of sections is shown as links at the top of the statistics page so you can jump straight to what you need.

For more detailed technical information about each of the statistics, see the AWStats Documentation.

Analytics vs Site Statistics - what's the difference?

Both tools give you an understanding of how your site is being used, but they work in quite different ways and each has its strengths.

Analytics tracks visits: when a person arrives on a page, it records that visit. Because it works using JavaScript running in the visitor's browser, it is much less likely to count automated traffic from robots and crawlers. This also means the figures update in real time - refresh the analytics page and you'll see the very latest visits. Analytics is the better tool for understanding your actual human audience and for measuring the impact of specific campaigns.

Site Statistics work differently: they count every request made to the web server, including images, documents, downloadable assets, and other files behind the scenes, not just page views. They also include traffic from robots and search-engine crawlers, which AWStats tries to identify and separate out, though some automated traffic will inevitably appear mixed in with real visitors. Site Statistics also show bandwidth — how much data your site is serving — which Analytics does not. The trade-off is that figures are only updated once a night, so they won't reflect very recent activity.

In short: use Analytics for up-to-the-minute visitor numbers and campaign tracking; use Site Statistics for a broader picture that includes file downloads, bandwidth, and historical data going back to your site's launch.

Broken Links

Keeping all the links in your content working correctly is one of the more time-consuming aspects of running a website - pages get moved, external sites change, and content gets removed. The Broken Links report does this checking for you automatically, listing any links in your content that are no longer pointing to a valid page. Each entry links directly to the page containing the broken link, making it straightforward to find and fix.

Links are checked whenever you publish content, and then rechecked approximately every two weeks.

Occasionally the report will flag a link as broken even though it works perfectly when you click it yourself. This can happen because some websites block automated checkers (like ours) while allowing normal browsers through. If you check a flagged link and it opens fine, you can safely disregard the warning.

Bear in mind that the broken links checker can only tell you whether a link still opens - it cannot judge whether the content at the other end is still relevant or accurate. It is good practice to review your external links periodically and update or remove any that are out of date, even if they are technically still working.