Is anyone looking at my website? It’s a simple but important question. OK, some people may use a website as a type of diary and may not be interested in whether anyone is reading it or not but I assume that you are like me and are hoping many people read what you have to say. There are many tools for tracking visitors to your website but I use two and I’ll explain why.
WordPress.com Stats
The first one I’d like to mention is WordPress.com stats. Again, like Akismet, you need to have a WordPress.com API key (see previous post). This is a nifty plugin that provides a variety of stats and graphs about your website such as how many times posts and pages have been viewed and where your visitors are coming from and you can look at it directly from your control panel. In fact if you have several sites, as I do, using this plugin you can check all their statistics from one of those sites control panels. Also because all of the processing and collection runs on wordpress.com servers and not yours, it doesn’t cause any additional load on your hosting account. That last sentence is pretty much copy and paste.
Official StatCounter Plugin
I use this on all my websites as well as my Cafepress shops. It is one of my favorite tools. You can get some of the same stats from the wordpress.com stats but the thing I love about this tool is that you can see what pages your visitors looked at, you can basically follow their path around your website and you can usually tell where each visitor came from and a host of other stats but the function that I just mentioned is what I look at the most. It can tell you a lot about the visitor but also about your site. If all your visitors are coming to one page and then disappearing from your website, you may have a problem. There are many reasons for this, it could be that you have only one page, an ugly website, a crap article, nothing that entices people to look at other parts of your website or a host of other things. It doesn’t tell you what the problem is unfortunately but it does tell you that there might be a problem.
To use statcounter you need to have a statcounter account but they have great free service.
Well, I am off to install those two plugins so I will finally know if anyone is visiting this site.
Note: In the next post I will talk about installing plugins and give you some advice about how to find plugins, how to choose the correct ones for you and what to watch out for.