The 8 Best Analytics WordPress Plugins to Grow Your Traffic
You can’t grow your website.
Not without analytics.
How would you know what to publish next or which marketing tactics to focus on?
If you want to succeed online, you need analytics to tell you what’s working and what isn’t.
In this article, you’ll find a collection of free WordPress analytics plugins that can tell you:
- Which pages get the most visitors
- What sites send you the most traffic
- Which countries & cities your visitors live in
And much, much more.
Keep reading to find out which analytics plugins will help you grow your business the fastest.
1. Independent Analytics
If you’re looking for a simple yet robust analytics tool, try our free plugin, Independent Analytics. It installs in seconds and doesn’t require any configuration.
Unlike other analytics plugins, Independent Analytics takes advantage of its integration with WordPress and shows you page-level data in its reports. For example, the main dashboard lists your pages and attributes like their Page Type instead of just listing the URLs.
This makes your analytics much easier to read. Not to mention, you can filter your pages by any table column, allowing you to easily view the traffic for only your blog posts or even find the top site searches.
There’s also a Referrers dashboard where you can find your top traffic sources and a Geographic dashboard listing every city where your site was visited from.
If you think Independent Analytics might be the right plugin for your site, give it a try today — it’s free!
2. GA Google Analytics
I like the GA Google Analytics plugin because of how incredibly simple it is. If you want to add Google Analytics to your site without any fuss, this is the plugin for you.
With GA Google Analytics, you can simply copy & paste your tracking script into the Settings menu. While Google Analytics 4 has made things more complicated, this plugin still offers a way for you to find and enter your tracking code without the hassle of authenticating your account and connecting your WP site to your Google site.
This plugin doesn’t add a dashboard to the WP admin, so you’ll need to visit the GA dashboard to see your stats.
In summary, it does one thing, and it does it well: adding Google Analytics tracking to WordPress.
3. Statify
If aren’t interested in deep analysis and just want a snapshot of your views, Statify will work wonderfully.
The Statify plugin adds a daily views chart to your admin dashboard, where you can see how much traffic you’re getting, which pages are most popular, and what sites are sending you the most visitors.
An advantage to using this plugin is that it doesn’t collect any data about your visitors, making it GDPR-compliant and excellent for data privacy.
One downside of using Statify is that it only stores data for two weeks, but you can modify this from the settings menu. Overall, it’s a simple but lightweight plugin for counting your site’s visits.
4. Site Kit
Site Kit is Google’s official analytics plugin for WordPress. If you’re big into Google Analytics, Search Console, and other Google products, this plugin will help you integrate them all with your site.
The advantage of using the Site Kit plugin is that it lets you easily integrate all of Google’s various products with your site. Additionally, it grabs various insights from each product and displays these stats in your dashboard. This can make it easier to review your performance because you don’t have to jump from one dashboard to another.
5. Post Views Counter
Post Views Counter is a good choice if you want both an analytics dashboard and a public post view counter.
It’s similar to the Statify plugin but with more options to configure the data. There are some pretty technical settings too, like deciding if you want to track views using the REST API, PHP, or Javascript.
As mentioned, a major reason for choosing Post Views Counter is that it adds a public view counter to your site. While most people won’t be interested in this, showing a public view count can be a great tool for attracting advertisers because it shows off how much traffic your site gets.
Independent Analytics also has a setting and shortcode that allow you to display a public view count on any page of your site.
If you want a simple analytics plugin for WordPress with a view counter, try out Post Views Counter today.
6. Koko Analytics
Koko Analytics is a straightforward analytics plugin for tracking your total views and visitors.
One reason for choosing Koko Analytics in place of Google Analytics is that it offers much better data privacy. While it does need to keep track of visitor IPs in order to count the number of unique visitors, it encrypts the IPs so that they can’t be returned to their original state.
The Koko Analytics plugin lets you see your pageviews from each day in an easy-to-read bar chart and also includes a list of your top pages and top referrers. This is great for finding your most popular pages and which sites send you the most traffic.
7. Matomo
Matomo is an advanced analytics platform that includes loads of data like your visitors’ geolocation, eCommerce sales data, and real-time analytics.
The Matomo analytics platform has been around for many years and can be used via their cloud platform or self-hosted. The WordPress plugin gives you a simple way to self-host their analytics so that all your data is contained within your website, which is helpful for adhering to privacy regulations.
If you’re more experienced with web analytics, you’ll appreciate how rich the Matomo dashboard is. You can click the button below to reach the plugin page and download it for your site.
8. WP Statistics
WP Statistics has been around for a while and is a popular analytics plugin with over 600,000 active installations.
This plugin is another alternative to Google Analytics and is entirely self-hosted on your site. There isn’t a configuration process, so you don’t have to copy & paste a tracking code yourself.
WP Statistics includes a lot of data in the dashboard, including your top pages, top traffic sources, visitor locations, and the browsers & devices used by your visitors.
Overall, it’s a solid plugin for anyone who wants a free and robust reporting solution for WordPress.
Which analytics plugin is best for you?
So what did you think?
There are some pretty great statistics plugins available for WordPress users.
If there’s an awesome WordPress analytics plugin that you think we missed, drop a comment below and let us know about it.
Thanks for reading!
Originally published at https://independentwp.com/blog/best-analytics-plugins-wordpress/ on October 13, 2022.
