Before you start, some things you should know:
WordPress.com StatsThe official WordPress.com Stats plugin requires only a WordPress.com key (free) and it will begin recording for you. This is a great plugin for a quick view of the most important metrics on your site – and thats how it will stay – slim.
Automattic’s goal with this is to give you easy to understand, simple statistics.





WordPress.com’s stats are a simple and easy to use plugin; however they are a bit minimal for my liking when they compete for the same task (in my opinion) as ShortStat.
WP-ShortStatBased on Shaun Inman’s ShortStat, the original shortstat stopped working sometime after WordPress 2.0. The modified ShortStat lives on though, and gives a great amount of short, to the point information. In my opinion, this is a must have for every site because it will keep the stats you need for a long period of time, without becoming bloated.





ShortStat is just great. Its meant to supply summarized statistics for a long period of time and it does just that. A quick glimpse at the page allows you to immediately see the day or weeks stats without delving, and it comes packed with other useful stats.
WassupWassup is pretty simple, but it has one great feature: SPY. SPY allows you to view your users live, where they are going as they go there. This is great if you are watching after a digg, or if you like to keep up to date.





Wassup is a mediocre stats plugin, if you try you can get whatever information you need (in a simple form) out of it; but then comes the SPY feature. If you are getting hammered, or hope to be, this is the best. Live tracking of users browsing on your site, and there incoming referrals etc is a great feature.
FireStatsFireStats is a nice app for keeping track of your popular items. It tracks Post Views, Search Strings, Browsers, Operating Systems etc. You can vary the time content is shown over using the toolkit icon (which can be missed) next to headings; this is a great feature if you’re comparing long term trends to current ones.





FireStats is a useful plugin if you are running a smaller site. For larger load sites I prefer ShortStat as you will never use the hit log in this, and the counting etc is not as nicely done. On the other hand, if you have a smaller site and are interested in specifics it can be very useful.
StatCounter.com has come to the party releasing a plugin purely for WordPress to integrate with their site. Unfortunately though, if you have a high load site you’ll end up paying (although not much). If you don’t, you’ll also be seeing ads on their site. The plus side is that the load of statistics isn’t on your server; and its very thorough.





Statcounter is a thorough service, providing a lot of information. Unfortuntely its not completely free, and is spattled in advertising etc. Compared to other products similar to this (such as Google Analytics) its not as good.
Google Analytics for WordPress is a plugin which essentially just adds the Google Analytics code onto your website, but with click tracking and more. Google Analytics is an extremely powerful statistics tool for someone wanting long term, extended statistics. Geekpedia has a thorough review.





Google Analytics is more powerful than StatCounter, and completely free. The best feature is the different views it includes; such as an Executive view and a Web Designer view. A powerful, freeb tool; and brilliantly implemented with the WordPress plugin.
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8 Responses
Tina Russell
March 27th, 2008 at 9:00 am
I finally decided to write a comment on your blog. I just wanted to say good job. I really enjoy reading your posts.
Tina Russell
Robert
March 28th, 2008 at 6:05 am
I’m surprised that you’re missing one of my favorites: GoStats for WordPress. I can say that I kicked my other stats system out when found GoStats. The best part is that it is a real time stats system which is fast and full of features. I tend to prefer it to Google because of the ease of use.
Altuure
March 29th, 2008 at 10:37 pm
nice blog :) fav+
skilline
March 30th, 2008 at 11:20 pm
wow coooooooooooooooooooooool
it’s really helpful
http://www.skilline,com
Une semaine avec Wordpress #10
April 13th, 2008 at 10:02 am
[...] En faisant ma veille de la semaine, je suis tombé sur quelques articles sympa, présentant différents plugins pour WordPress. Le premier est un billet reprenant les meilleurs plugins pour les statistiques. [...]
YoU
November 3rd, 2008 at 2:25 am
Very interesting and helpful post! Wassup is of great useful!!
robsku
January 21st, 2009 at 4:13 pm
Thanks for this post – I wanted to get browser stats on my blog but otherwise excellent WordPress.com Stats does not provide them – so I googled, came to your site and found WP-ShortStat that I now run just for that :) I still prefer WordPress.com Stats for other stats but this plugin is light enough so I run it as 2nd stats plugin just for the browser & OS stats.
Mike S.
May 6th, 2010 at 4:04 pm
nStatistics best plugin ever for wb blog statistics. http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/nstatistics/ . Super great graphs with zoom function, separate browsers and crawlers stats, raw data table. Graphs per day or per hours, visitors or crawlers graphs, top keywords used, top 10 most accesed pages / day top 10 best referers per day
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