jetpack

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.

Using Toolbelt instead of Jetpack on WordPress

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A screenshot of the Toolbelt plugin in the WordPress plugin directory

A couple of weeks ago, I stopped using the Jetpack plugin for WordPress, and switched to Toolbelt instead.

Jetpack is one of the most popular WordPress plugins and is developed by Automattic, so ditching it has been a big step. Here’s my thinking behind my decision.

What’s wrong with Jetpack?

Jetpack is a big plugin. This is because it does a lot of things, but it can add some big overheads to your WordPress install. Whilst more recently some features have been made available as individual plugins (such as Jetpack Security), many still use the large monolithic plugin.

It relies on services provided by WordPress.com, so there’s background web traffic going there. That can have an impact on your web site’s privacy policy, especially across international boundaries. And Automattic has been in talks with OpenAI and MidJourney about using content from WordPress.com and Tumblr to train AI models. Whilst there’s an opt-out, this really should have been opt-in. My content is licensed under Creative Commons, and I doubt these models respect licensing.

I’m also not keen on how Jetpack inserts adverts for its premium services into my WordPress install.

More disconcertingly, there’s been a recent incident of transphobia that involved a Tumblr user and Matt Mullenweg, Automattic’s CEO. It’s somewhat reminiscent of the Twitter Joke Trial, where an amusing but poorly thought out post got the user into trouble, and Matt waded in. I’ve generally been a supporter of Matt but this incident made me decidedly uneasy. I’m a member of the LGBTQ+ community and try to be a good ally to my trans friends, and I don’t want to support a company which is hostile to trans people.

What is Toolbelt?

Toolbelt is essentially a replacement for Jetpack. Like Jetpack, it offers a wide range of features in a modular way. By default, they’re all switched off, so you just need to enable the ones you want. There’s some overlap with Jetpack, but Toolbelt offers some additional features that Jetpack doesn’t have.

Toolbelt is much more lightweight; since installing it, my WordPress installation feels faster. I haven’t been able to quantify improvements, but pages should load quicker. Hopefully, WordPress will use less server resources too now. It does mean that some things look a little different, as I’m using Toolbelt’s social sharing icons and related posts, rather than those from Jetpack.

For the time being, this means new posts won’t be automatically shared to my Mastodon profile (and occasionally LinkedIn) until I install a different plugin to enable this. And I am currently still using Akismet for spam protection, although Toolbelt offers a comment spam module.

The only major caveat to Toolbelt is that it’s not currently in active development, although it says it has been tested with current versions of WordPress (at time of writing). Maybe it’ll get renewed attention.