AWStats (Advanced Web Statistics) analyses your server's access logs and generates detailed reports about your website traffic. It provides information about visitors, pages viewed, search engine referrals, operating systems, browsers, and more.
Please note: Screens and options may vary slightly depending on your cPanel version and hosting plan.
Accessing AWStats
- Log in to your cPanel account.
- In the Metrics section, click AWStats.
- Click the domain you want to view.
Understanding the Reports
AWStats provides several sections:
- Summary — Monthly overview showing unique visitors, visits, pages, hits, and bandwidth.
- Monthly History — Traffic trends over time.
- Days of Month — Daily traffic breakdown for the current month.
- Days of Week / Hours — When your visitors are most active.
- Countries — Geographic distribution of visitors.
- Hosts / Visitors — Individual IP addresses and their activity.
- Authenticated Users — Logged-in users (if your site uses authentication).
- Robots/Spiders — Search engine crawlers and automated bots.
- Referrers / Search Keywords — Where visitors came from and what they searched for.
- File Types — Breakdown of requests by file extension (HTML, images, CSS, etc.).
- Pages/URLs — Most visited pages on your site.
- Operating Systems / Browsers — What software your visitors use.
- HTTP Status Codes — Success, redirect, and error response distribution.
Key Metrics Explained
- Unique Visitors — Distinct IP addresses. Not a perfect measure of individual people (one person can use multiple IPs), but a reasonable estimate.
- Visits — A visit is a series of page views from the same IP with no more than a set idle time between them (typically 30 minutes).
- Pages — Requests for actual page content (HTML, PHP, etc.), excluding images, CSS, and JS.
- Hits — Every individual request, including images, CSS, JS, and other resources.
- Bandwidth — Total data transferred.
Tips
- AWStats data is processed periodically (usually daily). The current day's data may not be reflected until the next update.
- AWStats counts all traffic, including bots and crawlers. For human-only analytics, use a JavaScript-based solution (e.g. Google Analytics, Plausible, Matomo).
- If AWStats shows no data, ensure that your raw access logs exist and are being generated.
- Reports are month-by-month. Use the navigation to switch between months.
What Next?
- Viewing Visitor Statistics — Quick overview of recent visitors.
- Downloading Raw Access Logs — Access the underlying data.
