What gets counted
Your library says how many times your sites were opened over the last thirty days, and each site's analytics say who opened it, roughly. This is what those numbers are, and what they are not.
What counts as a view
One page, opened once. The stylesheet, the fonts and the four images it pulls do not add four more — only the document is counted.
A site opened inside a frame on somebody's website is counted separately, as “embedded”, because those are different questions: one is how many people came to your link, the other is how many met your site somewhere else.
A permalink to an old version is not counted at all. That is almost always you, looking at history.
A site's analytics
Open a site in Solta and choose Analytics beside it, or choose it from the site's menu in your library. Anybody who can change the site sees them; nobody else does. You see, for a period you pick:
- Views and visitors each day, and how both compare with the period before.
- Countries, roughly, from the visitor's connection.
- Devices: phone, tablet or computer.
- Pages, by their address on the site, without anything after a
?. - Referrers: the website a visitor came from, by its domain only, like linkedin.com. Never the page on it. Links between your own pages, and from anywhere on Solta, count as direct.
A visitor is one browser on one connection, on one day. Somebody who comes back tomorrow is counted again, because we cannot tell that it is them: that is the point. So visitors over a month are the month's days added up, not the number of different people.
How far back you can look depends on the plan of whoever owns the site: Free shows the last 30 days, Pro the last year, and Team all of it. The numbers are kept on every plan, so upgrading shows the past at once, and downgrading hides it rather than deleting it. They go when the site does.
The stats page
Stats, on each site's card in your library, or in the Analytics panel beside a site, opens the whole picture on a page of its own, at solta.now/s/your-site/stats. Pick the last 7 days, 30 days, 90 days or 12 months; a range longer than your plan shows is marked, and says which plan shows it.
As well as views and visitors a day, it lists where they came from, their countries, devices, browsers and operating systems, the pages of a folder site, and the websites the site is embedded on. Bots and link previews — search engines, AI crawlers, and the cards Slack, WhatsApp or LinkedIn draw when a link is pasted — are left out of all of it, so a link shared in a busy channel does not look like a crowd.
What we do not collect
No cookie, no identifier, no fingerprint, nothing stored per visitor. To tell one visitor from two, we hash the visitor's address and browser with a secret that changes every day, keep the hash in memory until the day ends, and write down only the totals. We do not know who anyone is, what they clicked, or whether the same person came back another day. There is nothing to opt out of because there is nothing kept about anybody.
The numbers are kept one way at a time — so many from Portugal, so many on phones — and never together, because together they start to describe somebody. If you need to follow what one person did on one of your sites, you need a tool that watches people, and we would rather point you at one than quietly become one.
Our own pages are different
Solta's own pages on solta.now — the home page, pricing, the blog, and these docs while you are signed out — are counted with DataFast, with a cookie, and only for somebody who said yes when asked. That is how we learn what brings people to Solta, and it is about people visiting us. It never runs on a site you publish, on your domain or in an embed. The one thing from your site that can reach it is its address: if your site is on your own domain and somebody who said yes on solta.now follows a link from it to us, DataFast sees your domain as where they came from. What it sees, and how to change your answer.
How accurate it is
Close, not exact. Counts are gathered up and written every few seconds, so a restart at the wrong moment loses a handful. That is the right trade for a number you read; it would be the wrong one for a number you were billed on, which is why the limits on your plan are counted somewhere else entirely.