analytics

Recent sidebar additions

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Screenshot of the additional sidebar widgets

I’ve added a couple of extra WordPress widgets to the sidebar, which appears on the right of blog posts if your screen is wide enough. For smaller screens, it’ll be at the bottom.

The first is a list of the five most read posts over the past 30 days. This is provided by the Koko Analytics plugin, which I use for analysing visitor statistics. Generally speaking, these will be the posts that seem to rank highest when people use search engines. My post about a free-standing CarPlay unit is perennially popular.

The second is a list of posts written on this day in the past. When I was a Movable Type user, I used Brad Choate’s OnThisDay plugin to achieve something similar. On WordPress, I’m using the Posts On The Day plugin instead.

Both plugins make a widget available to insert wherever widgets can go in your WordPress theme. They’re classed as ‘legacy widgets’ but are customisable in the WordPress user interface.

This does mean that, on shorter posts like this one, the sidebar is now significantly longer than the content. Oh well.

Koko Analytics – a stats plugin for WordPress

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A screenshot of the Koko Analytics dashboard running on WordPress. There's a bar chart showing daily visitors and page views, the most popular pages and referrers.

Back in March, I stopped using the Jetpack WordPress plugin, and replaced it with Toolbelt, which replicates many of Jetpack’s features. I’ve been concerned about the direction Automattic, and especially its founder Matt Mullenweg, have been taking, and so I’ve wanted to stick to self-hosted alternatives. Whilst Toolbelt does a lot, it doesn’t offer stats, and so I’ve recently starting using Koko Analytics.

Compared to Jetpack Stats, Koko Analytics, at least in the free version, is a little more basic. You’ll get to see how many visits and page views there have been, and also how many page views within the last hour. You can also see your most popular pages and blog posts, and which web sites have referred visitors to you. And you can import and export your data too.

For me, the main benefit of Koko Analytics is that all the data is hosted locally. With Jetpack Stats, you are uploading data to Automattic’s servers, which needs to be mentioned in your site’s privacy policy. Koko Analytics is therefore more respectful of the privacy of your visitors, by not sharing their data.

Koko Analytics Pro

There is also a paid-for upgrade, which costs €49 per year per site (about £40 at present). This also allows you to track what links people click on whilst browsing your site, receive weekly reports, and export data in CSV format. The cheapest Jetpack Stats plan is currently £50 for the first year, rising to £84 in subsequent years, and only for sites with 10,000 page views per month or less. Whilst, as an individual, I can use the free version of Jetpack Stats, I’m currently on around 8000 page views per month. Overall, Koko Analytics is significantly cheaper than Jetpack Stats.

I found out about Koko Analytics through this blog post from Terence Eden, where he has a guide to importing data from Jetpack Stats using some Python scripts. Thankfully, since that was written, the Koko Analytics plugin now includes a Jetpack Stats import tool which is much easier to use.

Whilst it’s basic, the fact that Koko Analytics is lightweight, and that it keeps all its data on your server, makes it a strong recommendation from me, if you need a stats plugin for WordPress.