Web traffic
Flow of data across the Web, the largest portion of Internet traffic
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Through Website, Bandwidth (computing) and Advertising
Not all web traffic is welcomed. Some companies offer advertising schemes that, in return for increased web traffic (visitors), pay for screen space on the site.
Sites also often aim to increase their web traffic through inclusion on search engines and through search engine optimization.
Analysis
Web analytics is the measurement of the behavior of visitors to a website. In a commercial context, it especially refers to the measurement of which aspects of the website work towards the business objectives of Internet marketing initiatives; for example, which landing pages encourage people to make a purchase.
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Control
The amount of traffic seen by a website is a measure of its popularity. By analyzing the statistics of visitors, it is possible to see shortcomings of the site and look to improve those areas. It is also possible to increase the popularity of a site and the number of people that visit it.
Limiting access
It is sometimes important to protect some parts of a site by password, allowing only authorized people to visit particular sections or pages.
Some site administrators have chosen to block their page to specific traffic, such as by geographic location. The re-election campaign site for U.S. President George W. Bush (GeorgeWBush.com) was blocked to all internet users outside of the U.S. on 25 October 2004 after a reported attack on the site. It is also possible to limit access to a web server both based on the number of connections and the bandwidth expended by each connection.
Traffic overload
Too much web traffic can dramatically slow down or prevent all access to a website. This is caused by more file requests going to the server than it can handle and may be an intentional attack on the site or simply caused by over-popularity. Large-scale websites with numerous servers can often cope with the traffic required, and it is more likely that smaller services are affected by traffic overload. Sudden traffic load may also hang your server or may result in a shutdown of your services.
Denial of service attacks
Denial-of-service attacks (DoS attacks) have forced websites to close after a malicious attack, flooding the site with more requests than it could cope with. Viruses have also been used to coordinate large-scale distributed denial-of-service attacks.
Sudden popularity
A sudden burst of publicity may accidentally cause a web traffic overload. A news item in the media, a quickly propagating email, or a link from a popular site may cause such a boost in visitors (sometimes called a flash crowd or the Slashdot effect).
Fake traffic
Interactive Advertising Bureau estimated in 2014 that around one third of Web traffic is generated by Internet bots and malware.
Traffic encryption
According to Mozilla since January 2017, more than half of the Web traffic is encrypted with HTTPS. Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS) is the secure version of HTTP, and it secures information and data transfer between a user's browser and a website.