Results of the Experiment

On Wednesday I turned comments off for the day, to see what impact it might have on stats if you didn’t have people reloading pages to see the latest comments.

The number of unique visits was totally unaffected (in fact above the average for the week), which is good as it shows that the stats package is not counting as a new visit, people returning to the site many times in one day.

The number of pageviews per visit though dropped from around 20,000 pageviews against a weekday average of 27,000.

So the very tenative conclusion I draw is that the comments don’t affect the number of visits greatly, but are responsible for around 25% of the pageviews.