10 Free WordPress Plugins to Track Traffic to a WordPress Site

Today, the one website any blogger flocks to is WordPress. This website has changed the face of blogging. The extremely simple procedure of writing a blog and adding images has led to new blogs being posted every minute on this portal.

However, the basic reason, any person starts a blog is to setup a revenue stream. Let us assume for a minute, you are among the thousands of bloggers on the WordPress website. You have been marketing your blogs across various platforms. Potentially, this should translate into some amount of revenue at your end. However, is there a way to track the same?

The answer is a resounding yes. There are many WordPress plugins to track traffic to your site – to capture the visitor count.

A plugin can help you get information on the number of people visiting your websites. It can be as detailed as capturing the change in trends when it comes to visitors and bounce rate. These statistics may seem irrelevant to a rookie blogger. But as the number of articles increase, he or she will be able to predict to some extent about the topics that can attract more visitors. It can also help them predict when is the right time to post the blogs and the frequency of the same.

As we said, this may make no sense when you are starting out in the blogging industry. However, ask any experienced blogger and they will attest to the fact that these tools have helped boost their revenues. The primary reason is the existence of statistics. The best plugins always uses mathematical formula to present an accurate picture. This formula helps them to differentiate between a genuine visitor and a surfer.

In order to understand these better, let us look at ten plugins. We will look at what they have to offer. We will also look at the positive and negative aspects of each plugin.

10 WordPress Plugins That Help You Track Your Traffic

JetPack

Developed by a company named Automattic, this application offers around 24 different features. But I’ll not cover all the features of this plugin but only focus on the traffic statistics option.

While the analytical module by Google is the most used, not many people understand how to infer the data. That is why this module is extremely beneficial. It displays the information in a clear and concise manner. You get information related to visitors, geographical statistics as per country and even a count of the top posts and top pages.

Combined with a number of other features, the JetPack module clearly stands among the top must have WP Plugins for any WordPress website.

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WP Power Stats

As good and function rich as the JetPack is, a blogger who is just starting out may find it too hard to fathom. For such novice bloggers, the WP Power Stats is the perfect option. A relatively new module in the market, this has the distinction of being the lightest plugin available. It does not use any form of code.

Another major selling point for the plug-in is that it provides a very simple and direct approach. Any individual-novice or experienced blogger can easily discern the information displayed. It can display information about the number of visitors divided as per geography, number of visits and other criteria.

However, there is a clear downside to this plugin. The lightness of this version is because it has a basic functionality. There have also been reports of a vast difference in the number shown by this plugin and JetPack with no actual explanation for the same.

My recommendation is that use this plugin only if you are entering the blogging industry. It will help you understand how to read statistics. However, ensure that you use a secondary tool like Google Analytics to cross check the information.

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WassUp plugin for WP

Nothing helps us better than a real time application. That is exactly what this plug-in does. With 4 easy to navigate menus like Visitor Details, Spy View Current Visitors Online and Options, you can find a line graph displaying the hits over time.

You can find data separately on the number of comment authors, logged in users and search engine spiders that are viewing your site currently. It’s a truly useful plugin to get real time statistics of your website.

However, the greatest downside of this plugin is that WassUp is incompatible with caching plugins such as WP Super Cache, which is indeed a highly popular plugin used by many websites for caching purposes.

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WP Statistics

I’ve found WP Statistics to be a highly comprehensive plugin with lots of features and displayed on the WordPress admin interface.

You can get real time analytics, i.e, people who are currently viewing your website, data for top pages and posts, search queries from popular search engines such as Google, Yandex, Bing, Baidu. You can also exclude robots from statistics collection, export data to excel or CSV format, exclude user roles from getting collected on statistics, set access level for different users and a lot of other things.

The downside of this plugin does exist. A huge size of 10MB for a single plugin is indeed too much, and because of its size, sometimes the plugin fails to auto-update itself. Also, a large manual of more than 5MB is exposed to a public link on your blog.

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Analytics360

This is an interesting plugin because it allows you to gather data from Google Analytics and MailChimp together to your WordPress dashboard.

As we all know, building a list is very important for the growth of any business and so it is important to keep track of the same. And this plugin tracks your mailing lists, stacks them up to each other and compares new and existing subscribers. You can also view the number of search referrals and direct referrals you are getting, comparing them to the traffic you are getting from email campaigns.

Even if it’s a powerful combination of the two, the downside of the plugin is that the data is not viewable on mobile phones.

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WP Slimstat

WP Slimstat is one of the most powerful and popular plugins to analyze real-time activity logs of your website. It is compatible with popular caching plugins such as WP SuperCache and W3 Total Cache. It has the most accurate browser detection and IP geolocation. Overall, using the plugin you can access stats directly from the dashboard, has a clean design and leaves no orphan files upon uninstallation.

The downside of this plugin is that it requires quite large memory space of 5MB and a minimum of 4MB of free PHP memory. Thus, the site slows down and sometimes, you can have issues loading the statistics.

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WP-Stats

This is a very basic plugin to display some basic stats of a website. The general stats displayed are total posts, total tags, total comments, number of spams blocked, recent posts, number of users online.

This plugin does not go into a breakdown of the analytics but provides with some basic information roughly needed.

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WP-Stats-Dashboard

This plugin is no longer maintained but is still a good plugin to display social engagement and your blog traffic on your dashboard. Your ranking on Alexa, Technorati and ranking across multiple sites are displayed with this plugin. Views per day, top 5 authors social profiles are displayed.

The downside is that you have to use this plugin at your own risk because it is no longer maintained.

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Simple Feed Stats

This plugin displays information about the number of people subscribing to RSS feed and reading your website content through RSS feed.

You can also display the number of subscribers and comment statistics using shortcodes available.

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Clicky Analytics

This plugin displays detailed stats on the number of users online, the bounce rate, the organic searches and average time spent by a visitor. It synchronizes and tracks video action for YouTube and also has email tracking feature. However, you need a Pro account to access the video analytics.

The plugin provides sufficient statistics, yet according to my personal experience, it sometimes slows down a site. You can get the analytics from the custom dashboard of Clicky Analytics.

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So, these were the 10 plugins I used free of cost and I shared with you all the pros and cons of each plugin I faced while using them. Do you know of any other good plugin to track traffic to your site? Please share via the comments below.