WordPress Stats For Self-Hosted WordPress Blog

Because I have never hosted my blog on the free WordPress blog hosting service I never knew that WordPress comes with cool stats system. However, it looks like the WordPress team has decided to offer their WordPress stats service to any self-hosted WordPress blogs. All you need to do is download and install this plugin.

There are hundreds of plugins and services which can provide statistics about your visitors. However I found that even though something like Google Analytics provides an incredible depth of information, it can be overwhelming and doesn’t really highlight what’s most interesting to me as a writer. That’s why Automattic created its own stats system, to focus on just the most popular metrics a blogger wants to track and provide them in a clear and concise interface.

To use the Stats plugin, you’ll need a WordPress account and a WordPress API key. You can either use the key from Akismet or get a new key from WordPress.

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Once installed and running the plugin will begin collecting information about your pageviews, which posts and pages are the most popular, where your traffic is coming from, and what people click on when they leave (I really like that one). You access your stats right from the WordPress Dashboard, where a blog stats tab has been added.