The 5 Best Real-time Analytics WordPress Plugins
Web analytics are great for seeing how your site has performed, but there’s one question that often goes unanswered:
“How many people are on my site right now?”
This data is hard to come by compared to stats on yesterday’s visits. However, there are a variety of novel WordPress plugins you can install to get this data (or similar data) into your WP dashboard.
Below you’ll find our top picks for the best real-time analytics plugins for WordPress.
The two types of real-time analytics
There are two different kinds of real-time analytics offered by the plugins here. Some show the number of visitors you’ve had as they arrive. For instance, you can refresh the analytics page to see how it’s increased since you last loaded.
There’s another type of real-time analytics that shows you how many people are on the site right now. For the sake of clarity, we’ll call this true real-time analytics.
All of the plugins listed here include live refreshing, but only a few of them have true real-time analytics.
1. Independent Analytics
Independent Analytics is a free plugin we developed that adds a full analytics suite to WordPress. It can tell you how many views each page has had, where your visitors are coming from, and how long visitors spend on your site.
Independent Analytics is also a true real-time analytics solution. In the free version, you can refresh the page to see any new visits, but in the Pro version, there is a separate real-time dashboard that updates every ten seconds.
This dashboard lets you see how many people are on your site right now, what pages they’re viewing, their referrers, and their geolocations. There are also charts showing you the number of views over the past five minutes and thirty minutes.
If you just want to check how many visitors your site has had today, the free version can do this and much more, but Independent Analytics Pro will be a good investment if you want to see the number of people on your site right now and what pages they’re viewing.
2. Visitor Traffic Real Time Statistics
The Visitor Traffic Real Time Statistics plugin is loaded with stats and interesting data.
From the main dashboard, you can see your visitors and visits over the past 30 days. The dashboard updates as visitors arrive, so you can refresh the page to see how many new visitors you’ve had since you last checked your analytics.
There is a Pro upgrade that includes true real-time analytics. This adds to your dashboard the number of people currently on your website. However, it does not include any further real-time data, such as the pages currently being viewed or the traffic sources for active visitors.
One drawback of this plugin is that it is not GDPR compatible since it records the IP addresses of visitors. If that’s not a concern for you, then you’ll appreciate the geolocation data and other info this provides.
3. WassUp Real Time Analytics
WassUp Real Time Analytics is another free analytics plugin for tracking your site’s stats.
This plugin is not a true real-time analytics solution, as it does not tell you how many people are on your site right now. However, it does update as people arrive, so you can refresh the dashboard, and recent visits will show up right away.
The dashboard is also different from other plugins listed here. While there is a chart showing your traffic over the past 30 days, the rest of the dashboard is a log of your recent views. This is useful to see exactly what’s happening on your site over time, but it doesn’t help much with analysis since you are only looking at a few views at a time.
Overall, it’s a useful analytics plugin for WordPress, and the log-style dashboard is unique and insightful.
4. Slimstat Analytics
Slimstat Analytics is another plugin that runs its own statistics engine in WordPress. You’ll find lots of data in this plugin, including your daily views, search engine visits, and visitor geolocations.
Unlike Google Analytics which processes data at midnight, you can visit your dashboard at any point in the day to see how many new visits you’ve had. Slimstat is real-time in that sense, but it doesn’t tell you how many people are on your site now or which pages they’re on.
If you want an analytics platform that runs entirely in WordPress and updates throughout the day, Slimstat Analytics could be a great choice for your website.
5. Analytify
Analytify is different from the other plugins listed here. The other plugins track stats entirely on their own, whereas Analytify requires Google Analytics. It basically makes it easier to integrate Google Analytics with your site and can pull data from GA into your WordPress dashboard.
One benefit of using Analytify is that it offers true real-time analytics, thanks to the way Google has developed this feature. You’ll be able to see how many people are on your site and which pages they’re viewing in real-time. However, this feature is only available in the Pro version of the plugin.
Analytify will be a good choice if you use Google Analytics and want to get real-time analytics data into your WordPress dashboard.
Get real-time stats in WordPress
As you’ve seen, there are some solid options for getting real-time analytics data into WordPress.
While all these plugins show data from today, only a few of them offer true real-time analytics, allowing you to see how many people are on your site right now.
If you want that kind of real-time data, you can get it from the Pro version of Independent Analytics, Visitor Traffic Real Time Statistics, or Analytify.
Learn more about Independent Analytics
I hope this collection of the best real-time analytics WordPress plugins has provided you with all the info you need to make a choice for your site. Thanks for reading, and feel free to post a comment below if you have any questions.
Originally published at https://independentwp.com/blog/real-time-analytics-wordpress-plugins/ on June 1, 2023.
