You can never know how successful your WordPress site is if you don’t have the right tools to measure visitors, pageviews, conversions, and every other aspect of the life of your WordPress site. If you are looking for ways to get more information about your site, here are some great WordPress statistics and analytics plugins to help you with the task.
1. Jetpack
Jetpack by Automattic (the company that created and maintains WordPress) is a very good multipurpose plugin. It’s not a stats plugin, per se, but it has a lot of reporting features you can use to gather stats and analyze them. In fact, if you already have Jetpack installed for some of its other functionality, you might not need anything else. Jetpack has a free and paid version, but even the free one offers quite a lot.
The thing with Jetpack, though, is that if you are only using its stats feature, then the plugin might be too heavyweight and bloated for you, as it also comes with a ton of many other features which you may not be using.
2. WP Statistics
WP Statistics is another great stats and reporting plugin with tons of cool features. With it you can get data about users, visits, visitors and page statistics, as well as detailed analysis of traffic from search engines. There are overview and detail pages for all kinds of data (browser versions, country stats, hits, exclusions, referrers, searches, search words and visitors). If you need to perform further analysis on your data with an external tool, you can export it from WordPress to XML, CSV or TSV.
3. Visitors Traffic Real Time Statistics
Although not as popular as WP Statistics, Visitors Traffic Real Time Statistics is also a good statistics plugin. The plugin has a free version and a paid version, and naturally the paid one offers more features and functionality. For instance, page tracking (i.e. which pages are viewed most often) is available in the paid version only. The free version does allow users to track browser versions, country stats, hits, exclusions, referrers, searches, search words and visitors.
4. StatCounter – Free Real Time Visitor Stats
Counters are a popular way to show statistics, and if you are interested in getting a counter for your WordPress site, you can consider StatCounter – Free Real Time Visitor Stats. The plugin has a free version and a paid version. The free plan offers a decent amount of features, such as summary stats and detailed stats, although detailed stats are limited to 500 pageviews only. With this plugin you can get data about hits, pageviews, entry and exit pages, referrers, keywords, visitor paths, etc.
5. Google Analytics Dashboard for WP (GADWP)
For all the fans of Google Analytics who believe all other analysis tools are inferior, there are a few WordPress plugins to enjoy. One of them is Google Analytics Dashboard for WP (GADWP). With this plugin you can get real-time data about the number of visitors, referrers, keywords, downloads, emails, affiliate links, etc. In addition to Google Analytics, you can also use Google Tag Manager to track your traffic. The plugin is free for personal and commercial use.
6. Google Analytics for WordPress by MonsterInsights
Google Analytics for WordPress by MonsterInsights is another very popular WordPress plugin you might want to try. The plugin has a free and a paid version and according to its developers, its main focus is on ease of installation and use, so this is a good plugin for not so technical users. Yet, it offers a lot of features, such as tracking of pageviews, downloads, ecommerce conversions, links, ads, events, etc.
It won’t hurt to simultaneously run two or more of these plugins because this way you can compare results. It might be surprising to see that the same data reported by different plugins varies drastically, but this is normal. The reason is that different plugins use different ways to measure traffic, visits, hits, etc., and this inevitably leads to a difference in results. In any case, even if the results aren’t too precise, any of these plugins will give you an idea about the direction your site has taken (e.g. increased traffic or the opposite) and will help you make decisions on what to do.
I am a fulltime freelancer who loves technology. Linux and Web technologies are my main interests and two of the topics I most frequently write about.
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