The WordPress.com Stats plugin aims to be as useful as possible while remaining as simple as possible (and free) so we decided not to count visits or visitors. MarkDK, it says “views” so it means “views” and not something else. I see no reason for confusing it with “visits”. If you can show me where the plugin gave you the idea that “views” might mean “visits” I’ll fix it.
If you look closely, there is no such real thing as a view or a visit or a visitor in the data we record. These are all made-up terms we use to describe technical events as though they were the real human events which they are designed represent. To be technically accurate, the plugin would say “script executions” instead of “views”, but that would not satisfy most users.
Basically, a view is counted when a browser displays a page and executes a script embedded in the page. There are failures, exceptions, and duplicates. There are many subtle technical factors that result in a thing being counted or not and the factors change with the internet ecosystem. I will not attempt to explain them further. If you are interested, you should learn the ins and outs of various browsers and read the stats javascript code.
