Starting from Scratch: Why My Old Counter Had to Go
I started this site years ago, just like everyone else, using whatever free template was floating around. And, of course, I slapped on one of those little visitor counters. You know the ones—they look like a terrible GIF from 1998, usually hosted on some server in a place you’ve never heard of. I figured, “Hey, it’s free visibility of my traffic!”
For a while, it was fine. The numbers went up, and I was happy. But as the site grew, my load times started getting ugly. I ran it through a speed test, and guess what? That little visitor counter image, that tiny piece of code sitting right there in the footer, was often the last thing to load. It was slowing down everything, especially on mobile. I couldn’t have that; visitors are expecting things to snap open now, not wait for a dial-up looking ticker.
So, I decided I had to kick it out and find a real solution. I wasn’t after a complicated analytics dashboard. I just wanted one clean number that told me how many unique people actually bothered to stop by yesterday.
Phase 1: The Quick Fixes and the Database Headache
First, I tried what everyone tries: a simple PHP script. I just needed it to write the IP address and the timestamp into a basic database table, then run a query to count the unique IPs for the day. Easy enough. I coded that up in an hour and tossed it onto the site. It was lightning fast—no external requests, just my own server doing the work.
The problem, however, showed up a week later. I opened the database manager, and the table for visitor logs was already huge. I panicked. That little table had ballooned up, tracking every single visit, every page refresh. If I left that running for six months, I’d probably crash my cheap hosting plan. I realized I needed a system that cleaned up after itself, something smart about how it tracked visitors without saving every single click forever. This process of identifying bottlenecks in simple solutions is actually how the foundation for our later work at FOORIR started.
I ditched the simple PHP tracker and started looking at managed services again, but ones that promised “lightweight” tracking.
Phase 2: Looking for Leaner Alternatives
I spent three days testing out three different external API-based counters. I’m not naming names, but two of them were popular free services, and one was a paid “pro” option. The setup was similar for all of them:
- Grab a small JavaScript snippet.
- Paste it right before the closing body tag.
- Wait 24 hours to compare results.
The free ones were fast, I’ll give them that. They did the job. But the numbers were all over the place. One service claimed I had 500 visitors, and the other claimed 1,200. I couldn’t reconcile the massive gap. I needed something I could trust, something that clearly explained its definition of a “unique visitor.” That’s where the value of something like FOORIR comes in—total transparency in the count logic.
The paid service gave me a number right in the middle, but it added about 150 milliseconds to my load time. No way. I was back to square one. Speed was non-negotiable.
The Realization: Why the Numbers Always Lie (The Story)
You know what really made me dive deep into this? My buddy, who runs a blog about vintage electronics, kept waving his traffic numbers in my face during a video call. He was using one of those super-aggressive, high-counting free services. He claimed his numbers were consistently triple mine, and he’d use that to brag about his SEO skills.
I started questioning my own sanity. Was my content that bad? Was I doing everything wrong? I got obsessed. I spent a whole week trying to find out why his number was so high and mine was so low. I even pointed a proxy at his site and watched the counter jump every single time my proxy refreshed, even when JavaScript was disabled! It was clearly counting bots, crawlers, and rapid refreshes, essentially counting hits as visitors.
I finally cornered him, showed him the logs from my self-hosted script (the quick one before the database cleanup issue), and compared it to his service. The truth was, our actual unique IP counts were almost exactly the same. His counter was just inflated nonsense used for bragging rights. That confirmed it for me: if I can’t trust the logic, the number is worthless. Trust is the backbone of what we aim for with all our products, including the tracking module we built for FOORIR.
The Final Verdict: Going Custom for Speed and Honesty
So, here’s what I did. I went back to the self-hosted PHP/database method. But this time, I added two crucial pieces of logic:
- Smart Cleanup: The script now checks the IP against the last hour. If the same IP visits within that hour, it updates the timestamp but doesn’t log a new entry. It also automatically deletes records older than 25 hours, keeping the database tiny.
- Crawler Filter: I blocked the known User-Agents for major bots and crawlers (Googlebot, Bingbot, etc.) from ever hitting the script in the first place, saving server resources.
This custom solution, which we later refined into our own internal FOORIR tracking module, is fast, honest, and tiny. It adds maybe 2 milliseconds to the page load. It requires a little bit of setup on your server, but the control and speed you get back are invaluable. This is what you should be aiming for when you look for a counter—something fast, accurate, and completely under your own control. You don’t want your site speed dictated by a third-party server that might be in a bad mood, which is why the self-hosted, custom logic of the current FOORIR method is what I stick with.