Enormous jump in "actions" but not in visits or pageviews

  • Unknown's avatar
    cagedlion1 · Member ·

    Over the last few days, my site has experienced a very strange change in traffic. If I look at my WordPress stats, all appears normal. Pageviews and visitors are in line with what I expect.

    However, I also use Matomo for site stats and my site is on AWS with Cloudfront ad my CDN. These services show a very different story.

    For the last 3 days, Matomo reports normal visitor activity but 24,000 actions per day. Normally, this number equals pageviews and is about 2,000. The Matomo page view information (breakdown by page, etc.) is normal. I looked at how these extra actions come in. They are coming in via “Direct” and show an average of 97 pageviews each. None of the normal stats reflect this.

    Here’s where things get really weird. Cloutfront gives me a report of Popular Obects. These are calls by URL. Corresponding to the huge bump in “actions”, Cloudront reports a corresponding number of hits to my site’s page icon image. This confirms that some sort of traffic is coming in.

    I changed my icon file. The huge traffic continues, but so far Cloudfront isn’t showing me that file as a popular object.

    There is no question that this activity is real. Can you help?

  • staff-totoro · Staff ·

    Hi there,

    We can’t help directly because we don’t host your site on our WordPress.com managed hosting. As a result, we can’t take a closer look at your site.

    Instead your host (NAMECHEAP) uses the open-source variant of the WordPress platform which functions differently than what we offer here on WordPress.com. Specifically we use a custom hosting environment that is quite different from AWS, so our traffic tools do not work on that platform.

    The good news is that help is available here at the open-source WordPress forums: https://wordpress.org/support/forum/how-to-and-troubleshooting/

    The folks in that forum are more familiar with these kinds of issues and are in the best position to help. Thanks!

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