Detailed Statistics

Clicking the View Detailed Statistics link at the top of the page takes you to a second page, shown in Figure 25.2, which breaks down site traffic by time periods.

Figure 25.2. The Statistics module's Detailed Statistics page.

At the top of this new page you'll see your busiest month, day, and hour, all based on hits, or page requests, to the Web site. Following that is a breakdown of hits by year, then day, and then hour. The monthly breakdown is always for the current year; the daily breakdown is for the current month, and the hourly breakdown is for the current day. You can click a month name or date to see breakdowns for that time period. For example, clicking November will show you a daily breakdown for November; clicking 5 will show you an hourly breakdown for the fifth of the month.

Why is this information important? Keep in mind that the most successful Web sites are the ones that have the freshest content. New content is what keeps users coming back. I recommend trying to have at least one new posting every day where your Web site is frequently visited. You can publish all the news items you want, for example, but use the article scheduling feature to spread out your content over several days so that the Web site always has something new.

When to publish new content depends on when your visitors are looking at the site. If weekday lunchtimes are your busiest hour, schedule new content to appear just before then. If nobody shows up on Fridays, don't waste content on those dayssave it for the following Monday. PHP-Nuke's detailed statistics can help you spot these visiting trends and take advantage of them to plan your site's growth or even maintenance: Don't plan to take your site offline to upgrade to a new version of PHP-Nuke during your site's peak access times. Wait until an hour when you traditionally have few or no users, and perform the upgrade then.