Warning: Do not use SiteMeter

If you use SiteMeter.com to keep track of your visitors and readers, this post may be important to you.

I’ve often noticed that my blogs and sites tend to be sluggish when loading in the browser. Trying to identify the source of the slowness, I’d usually look at the bottom of my browser where the various links are shown from where the site or blog tries to fetch stuff (e.g., internal servers, images, YouTube, etc.).

One link that would always pop up there was “dg.specificclick.net”.

I use Firefox as my main browser, but today I checked my sites in Internet Explorer, and what did I find? That “dg” link would start loading all of sudden, about ten or fifteen seconds after the site had loaded, and then suddenly redirect my site to the browser’s default search engine looking for “dg.specificclick.net”.

Now, the experience may differ depending on your IE browser settings, but as far as I know, my IE is set to all the default parameters (since I don’t normally use it, I haven’t had any need to “tinker” with its settings).

While in Firefox, the “dg” thingy merely causes a delay in the full loading of my site, in IE, it causes the browser to redirect to a search engine – about 15-20 seconds into the site loading. This means that readers using IE, and with settings similar or identical to mine, won’t be able to read the site because they’re taken away to a search engine instead. All this is prompted by that silly “dg.specificclick.net” thingy.

Well, but the fact that in IE I was taken to a search engine running a search on that particular link led me to some interesting info about the “dg” thingy.

As it turns out, it’s a cookie that is supposed to track a user’s browsing history. So, my IE settings apparently considered it a privacy problem and therefore triggered the redirect.

Now, why would there be such a cookie on my sites and blogs? I certainly didn’t put it there on purpose, because I’m really not interested in my readers’ browsing habits. No.

But the cookie, as I learned, is embedded in the code that you place on your site when you install SiteMeter.com.

So, I’ve done the only reasonable thing one can do in a situation like that: I’ve removed the SiteMeter.com code from all my sites and blogs.

In Firefox, the dg cookie caused my sites to load more slowly. In IE, it certainly prompted a redirect away from my sites, and other sites using SiteMeter as well by the way – i.e., if I were to read all my usual blogs in IE, I wouldn’t be able to read those with SiteMeter at all, because IE would redirect me away from them after about 10-20 seconds. Since I never use IE, I’ve never known about this issue until today.

Now that SiteMeter has been removed from all my sites, I’ve noticed that they all load much faster now, and in IE there’s no more redirect away from my sites (or any site that has SiteMeter installed).

Apart from that, I wouldn’t feel good about myself if I exposed my readers to a pernicious cookie like that – after all, IE considers it enough of a “threat” to redirect to another site.

My advice is this: if you use SiteMeter, remove it. Use another free counter, if you need a counter at all, such as StatCounter.com, for example. At least, I’m not aware of any issues with StatCounter. Or if you use WordPress or Typepad, use the service’s own built-in stats feature.

After all, who knows what other sort of rubbish SiteMeter puts into your site together with its code?

So, get rid of it. NOW!

Besides, maybe you’ll all be better off without a counter. Bloggers tend to become too obsessed with these useless stats anyway.