It’s important to know how many visitors you get to your website, but if you’re like me you just want easy access and easy to read stats. Let me share what WordPress Stats Plugin I use to achieve that. which lets me concentrate more on the content of my site.
The obvious first choice for web stats (or analytics) is Google Analytics. It’s not too difficult to set up, and you can check your stats on their website at any time. The stats are thorough, and there’s a lot of info that you can get, but it can be a bit tricky to navigate and find what you want quickly and easily. Or it might be just me 🙂
What I use on my most of sites is a wordpress plugin called WP Slimstat . As it’s a plugin, it is easy to install, and the major advantage to that of Google Analytics is you can view the stats on your website (within the WordPress admin backend).
Lets have a look at what the plugin will tell you. The main menu gives you these options:
The main option that I use for a quick view of visitors to my site is ‘overview’. From there I get a quick rundown of my pageviews (in a graphical format), top pages, recent search terms to reach me and top traffic sources to mention but a few. If you’re trying to rank for a particular keyword/phrase, this is where you can get a quick view.
The other option that I visit often is ‘audience’. From there I see a graphical representation of my visitor numbers for the last two months, plus a few other stats in tabular form (browsers, languages, screen resolutions, operating system and recent users) . It’s very easy at a glance to get the characteristics of your visitor base.
Access log is quite good if you want a live activity log of your visitors. I must admit I don’t use it but there is also a wealth of information presented there.
I’ll let you work out what site analysis, traffic sources and geolocation options give you in the way of information. I will mention, however, that even though you can get quite granular in what data you want, it is not overwhelming. The data is presented in a easy to read format and space well not to be too cluttered.
Don’t like the way the pages are laid out? Go to ‘customize’, and you and click and drag the display windows around, even to another page – perfect if you are only interested in specific information – put it all together. Below is a snapshot of part of the customize screen:
I probably should of mentioned this earlier, but this plugin and all of the features I have so far described is completely free and non restricted. As you could imagine, it is a very popular plugin and thus is updated quite often.
There are some additional, paid addons worth considering also. For a complete list, visit their website but the main ones of interest to me are the email reports (auto generated to your needs), and the heatmap. The heatmap is great as you get to visualize where on your site your visitors are clicking. The brighter the area, the more popular that particular part of the page is.
Still not convinced on this plugin. Check out this video below:
Do you use this WordPress Stats Plugin? If not, what do you use to track your visitors? Leave a comment below.