Stats Plugin
People love their stats. Here on WordPress.com, the most popular page in the dashboard after the home page is blog stats. We now have a plugin that allows you to get WordPress.com stats no matter where you host your blog.
One of the biggest complaints we hear when people switch to hosting their own blog is that they miss the stats system. (The others are that they miss the traffic from the community, tags, avatars, and comment tracking.) There are lots of stats plugins available for WordPress.org, but many of them slow down the site because they’re writing to a DB or they show generic website stats that aren’t tailored for blogs.
We started trying to figure out a way that we could offer our stats to self-hosted WordPress.org bloggers while still keeping the system super-flexible and fast, and the new plugin is the result of quite a bit of work by our stats guru Andy. Installing the plugin is simply a matter of dropping it in your plugins directory and putting in your WordPress.com API key, then your stats will start showing up within minutes.
The way the system is set up, we’re going to be able to roll out new features like we introduced outgoing link tracking a few months ago without anyone having to update their plugin. We also have some new things in mind for the stats interface that will impact everyone, like access to more historical data and an API for mashing up traffic data with other things.
Anyway, if you’re hosting your own WordPress.org blog, be sure to try the plugin out and let us know what you think. It should only take a minute or two to install, and works fine with any other stats systems you may already be running.
Further reading:
- Andy writes about the tech side of things and some FAQs.
- WordPress.com Stats for WordPress.org Users at Blogging Pro.
- Laughing Squid coverage.
- Follow-up by Andy.
- WordPress Users: Less Spam and Better Stats.
- Wordlog review.
- Jeff Nolan on the new stats.
May 6th at 4:09 am
Sweet. Can’t wait to figure out the API and game the system!
May 6th at 4:10 am
Awesome news, Matt!
May 6th at 4:11 am
Very nice… =)
May 6th at 4:23 am
good to know that…
May 6th at 4:29 am
GREAT
i’ve been waiting for this for a really long time. One of the reasons i stuck to wordpress.com was because of this plugin. But I don’t have a host anymore, so I’m glad that everyone else outside of wordpress.com will get this great feature.
Thanks once again guys for constantly introducing new stuff, we really appreciate it.
May 6th at 4:33 am
You dudes are the hosts…heh…heh…But I do like the stats feature and check it out all the time.
What’s up with my Spotlight request. I’d really, really, really like to have that. I use the Digg thingy all the time but Spotlight is da bomb for me….
…bein’ a political blogger an’ all.
Keep up the evolution as Darwin was right.
May 6th at 4:52 am
THANK YOU!
May 6th at 5:00 am
I love these Flash-based Charts, thanks for this plugin release.
May 6th at 5:23 am
Thanks!
May 6th at 5:34 am
Oh very cool, thank you!
May 6th at 6:01 am
rockinggggggggggggg I was looking for something like this yaaa. was so simple and great
May 6th at 6:10 am
thank you. it is just for me !!!
May 6th at 6:27 am
Great! Thank you!
May 6th at 6:53 am
I shall inform the masses, this is great news…
May 6th at 6:53 am
Cool! Yet, why should move to host on other services if WP.com have offered all the things people need. Blogger sleep at night very well coz all of WP staff’s hard work.
Thanks anyway…
May 6th at 7:10 am
wow… thank you for the stats plugin.. I love it very much.
May 6th at 7:41 am
thank you for this new plugin.. I have been waiting for it. I can use it in my self-hosted blog in http://simplyvie.com so thank you.. this is the stats I’ve been looking for.
May 6th at 8:33 am
thank you matt,my site , was going dry without blog stats shah ast hussain.com hosted by word press org.
firoze shakir
photographerno1
May 6th at 10:07 am
This is great, I already gave Andy a suggestion on how to improve user experience.
May 6th at 10:29 am
Great! Thx!!
May 6th at 11:12 am
This is really nice. Now i can just go to one place when checking my stat’s for sites. I might not dump Google Analytics for it but it sure does a good job for getting the quick “Whats hot – What’s not” type stats.
May 6th at 11:14 am
Good stuff.
I was wondering if I would have a stats page if I went to a hosted blog.
May 6th at 12:12 pm
Great work, I already made a WordPress.org blog and came back because it doesn’t offer the stats and there’s no community like the one we have in here. But now it’ll all be there too so it’s great.
May 6th at 12:46 pm
you are super…making blogging more fun than ever…I am addicted
Susan in Italy
May 6th at 2:23 pm
Thank you!
May 6th at 4:19 pm
anlamadım bişey ama herneyse
güzel bişeydir elinize sağlık 
May 6th at 4:29 pm
Congrats guys, this is awesome.
May 6th at 4:38 pm
Awesome! I was just searching around the wp.com forums earlier this week to see if this plugin existed, and now it does
I’m definitely going to try it on my self-hosted blog.
May 6th at 4:45 pm
Can you say something more about how the stats are actually counted. Am I correct to assume that using the WP-Cache plugin would get in the way of counting stats correctly?
May 6th at 4:46 pm
Because the stats are counted remotely via javascript, it’s completely compatible with WP-Cache.
May 6th at 5:00 pm
Any chance we’ll see a version for older versions of WordPress…. say version 2.0?
May 6th at 5:01 pm
There are no plans to make it work for anything older than 2.1. I would highly recommend upgrading, you’ll have a better blogging experience overall, and it’s faster.
May 6th at 6:09 pm
you are one incredible team – LOVE your commitment to constant improvement – thanks!
May 6th at 6:48 pm
I installed it on my domain, and it’s working so far. I have yet to see any of my stats, but we’ll see how it goes.
May 6th at 7:26 pm
Uber cool y’all!!!!
That’s been a drawback from switching to my own hosting – now I might end up doing that!
May 6th at 7:33 pm
I’ll give it a try, as soon as I get a visit =P
May 6th at 9:12 pm
WordPress 2.1 only? :’(
May 6th at 10:42 pm
I love wordpress.com
May 6th at 11:01 pm
Nice!
Know what else would be really sweet? If you had a plugin that let self-hosted blogs participate in the same tag/category space as the wordpress.com blogs.
May 6th at 11:16 pm
a plugin that is worth to be commented! great job guys!
May 6th at 11:28 pm
nice!
May 6th at 11:32 pm
I implemented this today and its a great tool. Thanks guys, it saves me having to use external analytics tools which aren’t made for blogs.
-Tim
May 7th at 12:10 am
I even asked about this in support, so I’m super duper happy that I can consider hosting elsewhere and still be in the WP loop/community! Thanks so much!!
May 7th at 1:03 am
I love you guys! I have been waiting for this plugin for a long long time.
May 7th at 2:47 am
thanks!!!
May 7th at 3:06 am
This has been my no. 1 request since I moved my blog off WordPress.com. Thank you so much for releasing the plug-in!
May 7th at 9:00 am
Blog Stats: Get your info-jones on with weblog traffic metrics
“Andy Skelton has just released this brand new plugin for WordPress sites, and it looks very, very promising (see also his Day One report, and Carthik Sharmas review). As of today, if you are a WordPress blogger, you can piggyback on the WordPress….
May 7th at 9:02 am
Thank you so much for providing this blog stats package, and thanks especially for providing it for free. Wahoo!
I liked it so much I blogged on it today.
Regards,
BlogRodent
May 7th at 11:35 am
Thank you, I am trying it on my other blog in other host
May 7th at 2:10 pm
thanks matty
I been using WP-SLIMSTATS as an alternative – might try this on a new blog.
May 7th at 2:43 pm
Great, and thanks to remenber me my stats addiction!
May 7th at 3:39 pm
very nice
May 7th at 6:33 pm
It will be interesting if the performance of blog goes down
May 7th at 9:47 pm
That rocks.
I’m definitely one of those people who is all over their blog stats.
Is there a place we can enter a wish list for the stats page? I have a few. I miss a lot of the longer-term reports I can get from Google Analytics.
May 8th at 12:44 am
Whew. At long last, they finally released the stats I’ve been looking for, & had missed when I hosted my site elsewhere. Thanks, WP team. Truly superb, really appreciate it.
May 8th at 11:22 am
Nice Stuff… freaking hell!
May 8th at 12:30 pm
Very cool! I’ll be sure to recommend this to some of my friends who host their own WordPress blogs.