Contrary to popular belief, a hit does not represent a single visitor to a website. A hit is actually a request for a single file from your web server. This means one page can actually generate multiple hits, as each page generally has more than one file, for example a HTML or other base file, a CSS file, multiple images and so on. Each request for each file is one hit, so a web page with 50 images on would register 50 hits. Many years ago, hits were quoted as the main traffic metric, to amplify sites into sounding like they were receiving more traffic than they actually were