Question

I’m not talking about if user has visited the website before, but in general when a user (regardless if they’ve visited the website before) that’s not logged in, has just visited the homepage of your website? I’m thinking it has to do something with sessions, but I haven’t quite figured it out yet.

Answer 1

You can do this with $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'] that will return the last page’s address visited. You can not rely on this for important things because this variable can be changed and might be not set by the user agent.

From the PHP documentation:

The address of the page (if any) which referred the user agent to the
current page. This is set by the user agent. Not all user agents will
set this, and some provide the ability to modify HTTP_REFERER as a
feature. In short, it cannot really be trusted.

You could also use a cookie or a session variable and set the page visited like this:

// by file
setcookie('last_page', $_SERVER['PHP_SELF']);
// by uri
setcookie('last_page', $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']);

and check with:

// homepage
$home = 'home'; 
// check
if ($_COOKIE['last_page'] == $home) {}

References

• $_SERVER
• setcookie()
• $_COOKIE