web analytics

Wordpress

Best Free Visitor Statistics for a WordPress Blog

You have placed your new flashy wordpress theme, you have added a few quality articles and you are a proud man now. You are sure there are some visitors reading your blog posts already but you want all the details and you are right. Visitor tracking and detailed statistics is a vital parameter you need to follow so your blog can grow and head towards the right direction. I can help you about this by recommending some tried and tested tools/plugins.

1) If you are running wordpress blog, chances are you have met Statspress plugin. It is a great real-time tool for counting daily and monthly visitors with all the small details like: browser, Operating System, Country, IP, and complete referring details also . It is very practical and detailed for a new blog, but once your blog starts getting more than 1000 unique visitors a day, it becomes quite a burden on your server with huge database load it causes with constant writing and queries to the database.  The plugin’s database table (wp_statspress) gets so large, many hundreds of megabytes and the only solution I found around this is to empty the table each week, which is manual job and so boring.

Statspress plugin:
statspress plugin visitors

2) Statcounter.com is a great free tool, widely-used all across the world and it needs just a simple JavaScript code inserted in all pages of your website/ blog and provides you with simple real-time, easy-to-study stats information and referrers. it is worth mentioning that it is a web-based service and doesn’t take any of your server’s resources.

Top 11 WordPress Plugins for 2012 for your site

I have recently read that Wordpress powers 14.7 percent of the top million websites in the world. I think that this number is even bigger with the new sites popping-up each day, and this is our way of helping Wordpress users, by listing the most useful and recommended plugins for the 2012 based on my experience in running over 200 Wordpress Blogs :

  • Platinum SEO Pack – Most powerful free SEO plugin that enables On-Page SEO Optimization Out-Of-The-Box with the default settings. No need to edit its settings if you want to start blogging immediately and you can come back later and fine tune some options.
  • Contact Form 7 – Every wordpress blog needs a contact page and you should not delay installing this plugin. Just copy and paste the html code provided and name your new page “Contact” and you have a nice looking contact form.
  • Syon Easy Privacy Policy And Terms Of Use Plugin – Similar like Contact Form 7 but provides a code which enables you to have Privacy Policy and Terms and Conditions in under 5 minutes total. It is recommended for any type of site, but IT IS A MUST for an Adsense site.
  • Google XML Sitemaps – Simple to use plugin – it creates a XML sitemap of your blog posts and pages so your sites is easily crawlable and SEO friendly (RECOMMENDED).

A glance into plugins section of this blog:
list of wordpress plugins