When you visit a website, each time a page loads in your browser, files are requested from the server hosting the site. Each of these requests is called a “hit.” For example, if a page contains four images, loading that page will generate five hits: one for the HTML file and four for the image files.
Web servers record the number of hits, but it’s important to note that this number doesn’t directly reflect a site’s actual audience. Hit count was once used as an audience metric in the early days of the web, but this practice has since been abandoned.
Therefore, hits are file requests sent to the server when a web page loads, but they don’t provide an accurate measure of a site’s audience.
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