Website Statistics Report: Screen Resolution
Overview
This website statistics report lists all the Screen Resolutions that have been used by visitors to your website. Details are displayed in screen width and height in pixels.
It is important to make sure that your web pages are designed to operate effectively on most visitors screens. A common mistake when building a website, one performed by beginners and seasoned professionals equally, is to build a website to the Screen Resolution they themselves use, so naturally the design looks good on their monitor. If other Screen Resolutions are not taken in to consideration the results for large sections of the web population can be a confusing and frustrating visit to your site, with menus, options and content hanging of the right or bottom of the Screen. It is important to test your pages using different Screen Resolutions to make sure they work and look good.
Trying to design a page that is perfect in every single screen resolution is virtually impossible. I am surprised on a daily basis with the large variety of different resolutions out there, as can be seen in Table 1.
As there are such a large number of different resolutions this report includes the following summary values:
- The maximum resolution width and height
- The minimum resolution width and height
You can use these to test against rather than trying to figure out how to achieve each resolution, which would likely involve buying a lot of different monitors and a tangle of cables!
Example Screen Resolutions:
The following is an extract taken from a popular website and shows the numerous different screen resolutions that the website is potentially required to cope with
| Operating System |
Percent |
Sessions |
| 1024x768 |
53% |
22791 |
| 1280x1024 |
14% |
5863 |
| 800x600 |
9% |
3878 |
| 1280x800 |
8% |
3611 |
| 1440x900 |
4% |
1625 |
| 1152x864 |
3% |
1150 |
| 1680x1050 |
2% |
853 |
| 1280x768 |
1% |
606 |
| 1400x1050 |
1% |
541 |
| 1920x1200 |
1% |
310 |
| 1280x960 |
1% |
301 |
| 1600x1200 |
1% |
234 |
| 1344x840 |
0% |
160 |
| 1280x854 |
0% |
113 |
| 1536x960 |
0% |
91 |
| 1120x840 |
0% |
72 |
| 1024x819 |
0% |
66 |
| 1360x768 |
0% |
62 |
| 1152x870 |
0% |
45 |
| 819x614 |
0% |
44 |
| 1366x768 |
0% |
42 |
| 1280x720 |
0% |
41 |
| 1440x960 |
0% |
39 |
| 1152x768 |
0% |
30 |
| 2560x1600 |
0% |
25 |
| 2560x1024 |
0% |
22 |
| 1152x720 |
0% |
20 |
| 2048x768 |
0% |
18 |
| 1088x612 |
0% |
12 |
| 1024x720 |
0% |
12 |
| 1120x700 |
0% |
11 |
| 640x480 |
0% |
11 |
| 1024x640 |
0% |
11 |
| 1522x951 |
0% |
10 |
| 1600x900 |
0% |
9 |
| 2048x1280 |
0% |
9 |
| 1600x1024 |
0% |
8 |
| 1024x614 |
0% |
7 |
| 1024x1280 |
0% |
7 |
| 991x707 |
0% |
6 |
| 960x720 |
0% |
5 |
| 320x240 |
0% |
5 |
| 800x552 |
0% |
5 |
| 1024x600 |
0% |
5 |
| 1024x738 |
0% |
5 |
| 1101x838 |
0% |
5 |
| 1024x711 |
0% |
5 |
| 964x723 |
0% |
4 |
| 3072x768 |
0% |
4 |
| 240x320 |
0% |
4 |
| 1200x1600 |
0% |
3 |
| 1217x730 |
0% |
3 |
| 960x600 |
0% |
3 |
| 1280x600 |
0% |
3 |
| 3840x1024 |
0% |
2 |
| 1010x709 |
0% |
2 |
| 1600x1000 |
0% |
2 |
| 853x533 |
0% |
2 |
| 480x640 |
0% |
2 |
| 2800x1050 |
0% |
1 |
| 768x1024 |
0% |
1 |
| 1056x792 |
0% |
1 |
| 832x624 |
0% |
1 |
| 791x546 |
0% |
1 |
| 1360x1024 |
0% |
1 |
| 240x240 |
0% |
1 |
| 800x5000 |
0% |
1 |
| 2400x600 |
0% |
1 |
| 3200x1200 |
0% |
1 |
| 795x549 |
0% |
1 |
| 2048x1536 |
0% |
1 |
| 1440x852 |
0% |
1 |
| 1007x693 |
0% |
1 |
|
Table 1: Screen Resolutions
A note about designing for Screen Resolutions
The bible of good webpage design states that screens should be optimised to fit within a minimum of 800px by 600px however there are now increasing numbers of sites that require a minimum screen resolution higher than that, because it is argued most Computers have bigger screens now. Personally I still stick to the “will work in 800 x 600” design philosophy because of the new wave of mobile computing devices that are gaining increasing usage. Of course these often have smaller screens that 800 x 600 however it is a standard and as such is worth testing against.
If your website receives a lot of requests from mobile (or small screen) devices it is probably worth considering developing a mobile version of the site. This is traditionally written in WML rather than HTML, however as mobile devices become more powerful HTML crafted to produce output on a small screen will often do.
Report Options
As with most reports you can choose the date range that this report runs. There is also a printer friendly version which is available by clicking the icon in the top right of the report.
How this Report Works with the Log
Log size is very important to this report as each log record represents the data for one session. If your log is full you will be losing the oldest record with each new visitor so increase the log size to store more data and analyse trends further back in time.
If you are performing optimisations to your website that are aimed at increasing the average return count make sure you have enough log space to store both historical data and sufficient new data to put your optimisations to the test.
To understand how to get best use of this report read
Managing Website Session Log help document.
Optimising your site for this Report
This report requires no special treatment to get the best out of it other than the standard bullet points of …
- Ensure that the tracking code is placed on every page of your site
- Ensure that your log is as big as possible.
- Use this report in conjunction with the Referrers Report to build up a picture of where visitors to your site come from.