Hope you all are enjoying the week so far! Today I want to chat a little about viewing your website stats, particularly on the WordPress platform. We use (and love) Google Analytics so we’ll go in-depth about that another time, but a really simple way to check your stats in the mean time is through the Jetpack Plugin for WordPress. Once you have Jetpack installed, you can simply go to Jetpack > Site Stats in your WordPress dashboard and check out your site’s basic activity.
The first thing you’ll see is a bar graph of your daily pageviews from the past month. This is a great way to see which posts performed better than others, which days of the week bring in the most traffic, etc. You can also view your weekly and monthly pageviews here for a more broad view.
If you click the “enhanced stats” link above this graph, you can check out your daily/weekly/monthly visitors. Just having a lot of pageviews doesn’t mean that a lot of people are individually viewing your site, so being aware of your number of visitors is very helpful.
Below the pageviews chart, you’ll find a list of your referrers (it’s so fun to see where you’re getting blog love from!), your top posts and pages, as well as search engine terms, clicks from your site, and subscriptions.
Obviously Jetpack Site Stats is a lot less detailed than Google Analytics. So why use it? In my opinion, it’s the quickest way to get an at-a-glance idea of how our site is doing at any given time. At the end of each month, we always take a deeper look at Google Analytics and record our more detailed stats.
Our stats on Google Analytics are usually pretty on par with our stats on Jetpack Site Stats, but in the end we record whatever stats GA has for us. Google Analytics might be a bit more accurate than Jetpack, but I can’t give up this easy way of viewing our stats.
How do you view the stats of your website? It gets a little addicting checking our pageviews, huh?
Doreen Arteaga says
I also use Jetpack for a quick view of my site. I have Google Analytics on my Dashboard. You are right it is addicting to follow the numbers and graphs.! Thanks for your post!
Liselle @ Lunch-Time Librarian says
I find that Google Analytics is very susceptible to spam visitors and referrers and so when I was using it more than half of my visitors were actually spam and I wasn’t getting accurate results.
Jetpack doesn’t have any spam referrers at all and so I only use it now.
Brittany says
I also use jetpack for quickly checking my stats. I’ve found they are super useful to identifying trends.
Brittany | thechicette.com