How to Add Analytics to Your WordPress Admin Dashboard

Want to track your visitors?

There are numerous analytics tools that can track your visitors, but most of them don’t add an analytics dashboard to your WordPress site’s admin menu.

To make your stats easy to access, you’ll want an analytics plugin that will display your views and visitors inside your WordPress dashboard, so you don’t have to log into another app.

The good news is that there are some excellent solutions available that are completely free to use and fully integrated with WordPress.

In this post, you’ll find our top recommendation to add a stats dashboard to WordPress, as well as how to install it on your site.

Add an analytics plugin

The best part of using WordPress is that there’s a plugin for everything. When it comes to analytics, things are no different.

If you want to see your site’s views and visitors in your WP dashboard, you can install the Independent Analytics plugin.

Independent Analytics is free, easy to use, and won’t slow down your site.

Unlike external analytics apps, it runs entirely on your site, making it more privacy-friendly as well.

You can download it from our site or install it by searching for it by name in the Plugins > Add New menu of your WordPress admin dashboard.

Once installed, you’ll see the analytics dashboard show up right away.

Where to find the dashboard

With the plugin installed, you’ll find the new Analytics menu added to the top of your sidebar:

The analytics dashboard includes your total views and visitors, a visual chart, and a data table listing every page that’s received a view.

You can also change the date range, sort the rows by any column, and use filters to drill deeper into your data.

Tracking only begins once the plugin is installed, so you won’t see any visitors at first. That’s why it’s a good idea to get started sooner rather than later.

From the analytics dashboard, you can find all sorts of insights, like your most popular pages and top site search terms.

But you won’t always be doing this type of analysis.

Sometimes, you just want to see how many visitors you had yesterday, and for that, there’s the admin dashboard widget.

The admin dashboard widget

The full analytics dashboard is easy enough to use, but if you just want to see your recent view counts, you can do so without visiting the Analytics menu at all.

Independent Analytics adds a widget to the admin dashboard that includes a chart and the number of views and visitors your site has had over the past 30 days.

It might not seem like a big deal, but if you check your stats frequently, this will save you from the extra click and page load every time you want to check today’s visitor counts.

Not to mention, you’ll see it every time you log in, so you’ll always have a good idea of your site’s daily traffic.

Does this use Google Analytics?

Most WordPress users are so familiar with installing Google Analytics they don’t even realize there are alternatives.

So to clarify, Independent Analytics does not use Google Analytics; it’s an entirely different analytics solution. You don’t need to use a Google account or signup for an account anywhere else to use it.

All you have to do is install the plugin, and tracking will begin right away.

Adding stats to your dashboard

With the right tools, adding a stats dashboard to your WordPress admin is very easy.

We think that Independent Analytics is the best choice, but there are other analytics plugins you can check out too.

Regardless of your choice, we hope this has made it easier for you to monitor your website’s performance and view your analytics.

Thanks for checking out this guide on adding an analytics dashboard to WordPress. If you have any questions or recommendations of your own, drop us a note in the comments section below.

Originally published at https://independentwp.com/blog/analytics-wordpress-dashboard/ on October 25, 2022.