cPanel builds traffic statistics from the web server's access logs, so they work without adding any tracking code to your site. They also count visitors that block JavaScript analytics, and they show bots and crawlers, which helps when you are investigating slowness or bandwidth use. The tools live in the Metrics group.
Before you start
- Statistics are processed periodically (typically once a day), so today's traffic may not show until later.
- Decide which domain you want to look at; each domain and subdomain has its own report.
Visitors: the latest hits
- Open cPanel → Metrics → Visitors.
- Click the magnifier next to a domain. You see the most recent requests (up to about 1,000 entries): IP, time, URL, status code, size, referrer and user agent.
- Use the column picker to show or hide fields and the search box to filter, for example by
404or a bot name.
This is the quickest way to answer "who is hitting my site right now?"
Awstats: daily and monthly reports
- Open cPanel → Metrics → Awstats.
- Click View next to the domain (choose the
httpsline for HTTPS traffic; on many servers both are combined). - Pick the month at the top and use the menu on the left.
| Section | What it tells you |
|---|---|
| Summary | Unique visitors, visits, pages, hits and bandwidth for the month |
| Days of month / Hours | When your traffic peaks |
| Countries | Where visitors come from |
| Robots/Spiders visitors | Googlebot, Bingbot and aggressive crawlers, with bandwidth used |
| Pages-URL | Most viewed pages and entry/exit pages |
| Referrers / Search keyphrases | Sites and searches that send traffic |
| HTTP Status codes | Counts of 404 and other errors; click to see which URLs |
Note: Awstats counts every request in the log, so numbers are usually higher than Google Analytics, which only counts visitors that run its script. Neither is "wrong"; they measure different things.
Bandwidth
Open cPanel → Metrics → Bandwidth to see data transfer per day, month and year, split into HTTP, IMAP, POP3, SMTP and FTP, and per domain. The account total is compared with your plan limit in the Statistics panel on the home page.
Practical uses
- Find a bandwidth hog: Awstats → Robots shows crawlers using gigabytes. Block them with
robots.txtor IP Blocker. - Fix broken links: Awstats → HTTP Status codes → 404 lists missing URLs. Add redirects for important ones.
- Spot hotlinking: Referrers from unknown sites to your images; see hotlink protection.
- Plan maintenance: Hours report shows the quietest time.
Troubleshooting
- Awstats shows no data: the domain is new or the stats have not been processed yet. Wait 24 hours.
- Awstats missing from Metrics: the server administrator may have disabled it; use Raw Access logs instead, see error and raw access logs.
- Metrics Editor: under Metrics you can choose which stats programs run for each domain.