Request
I note the usage statistics you released for legislation at legislation.gov.uk in this FOI response – https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/legislationgovuk_most_viewed_and#incoming-1995679.
Please can you send me the following data:
for the Freedom of Information Act 2000 only, the usage statistics (including page views and users) separately for each online page on legislation.gov.uk relating to that Act, for the latest annual period for which that data is available
Outcome
Information provided.
Response
We have provided the statistics you have asked for in your request within the attached document. All the statistics provided in this spreadsheet look at a specific time period – from the beginning of March 2021 until the end of February 2022 – and count the number of:
- Page views: represent each individual time a page on legislation.gov.uk is loaded/opened
- Users: a distinct human individual, determined by the client IP address, namely a unique address that identifies a device on the internet
The spreadsheet contains:
Enacted Document Breakdown:
This shows the amount of page views and users for each section of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 Enacted Version as well as overall usage for the whole document and Table of Contents (which is not a part of the Act in its own right, but is the page on legislation.gov.uk that allows the user to navigate the Act). The enacted version is the version of the Act as originally published – please note that this is not the default version of the Act as displayed to the user on legislation.gov.uk. The table lists the provisions of the Act as they appear in the enacted Table of Contents.
Revised Document Breakdown:
This shows the amount of page views and users for each section of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 Revised Version as well as overall usage for the whole document and Table of Contents. The revised version is the Act as amended over time – please note that this is the default version of the Act displayed to users of legislation.gov.uk, therefore is the most commonly viewed version of the Act, so the usage figures are much higher than for the original enacted version. The table follows the revised Table of Contents order which is different to the enacted Table of Contents (as additional provisions have been added over time).
Explanatory Notes Breakdown:
This shows the amount of page views and users for each section of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 Explanatory Notes (as well as overall usage for the whole Explanatory Note and its Table of Contents. The table follows the Explanatory Notes Table of Contents order.
The tables in the attached spreadsheet are ordered as they appear in the Table of Contents. To quickly check which sections have the most page views (or the least), there is a colour scale to the Page Views column: green = most viewed, red = least viewed, and yellow = average/midpoint. For your information, these statistics only include “successful” requests (any page that was successfully loaded), excluding all “unsuccessful” ones (e.g.: “page not found”, errors, etc.).
Where possible when producing these statistics, The National Archives has excluded any page view request which has been identified as coming from a web crawler/spider; that is a software application or a bot (robot) which systematically browses the web for the purpose of indexing. The National Archives has an automatic tagging system which should identify whether a certain request or page view comes from a web crawler/spider or bot. However, this tagging is not always accurate and, sometimes, many requests cannot be categorised. Furthermore, sometimes a low number of users and a very high number of page views could be the result of web crawler/spider or bot activity which we have not been able to identify as such and exclude from the statistics. This means that there may be instances in which web crawler/spider or bot requests have been included within the statistics provided.
In order to limit any inaccuracy as much as possible, we regularly try to manually cross-check any “suspicious” IP addresses and exclude them from the statistics but, again, we cannot guarantee that web crawler/spider or bot activity is completely excluded from the provided statistics nor any others The National Archives produces.