: Succesful hits on favicon are 49.9% as shown by Awstats, But 404s don't display favicon error. What's wrong? On Awstats, one of the sections displays as it follows: Successful hits on favicon.ico

@Jamie184

Successful hits on favicon.ico -> 49.9%


This means that 49.9% of unique site visitors successfully requested favicon.ico. I don't think it necessarily means that 50.1% were "unsuccessful" in the sense that it resulted in error - it just means that 50.1% of visitors did not request the favicon, or maybe they did but was perhaps cached (304 - Not Modified)?

If you have a favicon.ico file then I'm pretty sure it is safe to assume that you are not getting any 404's as a result of requests for the favicon.ico file. (Unless your server is broken?!)

--EDIT--

I mentioned in comments that I have a site that reports just 7.2% "successful hits" on the favicon.ico file. This corresponds to 157 / 2175 (Unique) Visitors (the 2nd column in the AwStats table) for the month in question.

Now I've just had a look at the raw access log... there are a TOTAL of 157 requests for favicon.ico, 140 returned a 200 (OK) status, 4 returned a 304 (Not Modified) and 15 returned 301 (I think as a result of server security). There are no 404 or other error states for the favicon, so I can only conclude that the "unsuccessful" 92.8% of unique visitors simply did not request the favicon.ico file!?

Yes, it would seem that "successful" is rather missleading. If all requests were deemed "successful" then you would perhaps expect to see 100% reported, but this is not the case if not all "unique visitors" request the favicon.ico file.

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