7 Open-source Free Web Analytics Extensions for WordPress
If you run a WordPress website, it's important to track your site visitors and analyze their behavior. This information can help you optimize your site performance, improve your marketing strategy, and ultimately increase your conversions. One way to do this is by using WordPress statistics plugins. In this blog post, we'll introduce you to the top open source WordPress statistics plugins for site visitors, and show you how to install and use them to improve your website performance.
Introduction to WordPress Statistics Plugins
WordPress' statistics plugins are tools that allow you to track and analyze your site visitors' behavior. They provide valuable insights into which pages are the most popular, where your visitors are coming from, and how long they stay on your site. With this information, you can optimize your site content and improve your user experience.
Open source plugins are software programs that are freely available and can be modified and distributed by anyone. There are many benefits to using open source plugins for site analytics:
- Cost-effective: Open source plugins are often free or low-cost, which is great for small business owners and bloggers on a tight budget.
- Flexibility: Open source plugins are highly customizable, which means you can tailor them to meet your specific needs.
- Security: Open source plugins are constantly being updated and maintained by a community of developers, which means they are often more secure than proprietary plugins.
- Community support: Because open source plugins are developed by a community of developers, there is usually a wealth of documentation and support available to help you use them effectively.
Some top open source WordPress statistics plugins include:
1. Burst
Burst is a native WordPress analytics plugin with many features that you can use for free. It features a rich privacy-friendly analytics within a clutter-free simple yet powerful analytics dashboard.
Burst features' highlights:
- Essential Metrics: Page views, Visitors, Sessions, Time on Page and Referrers.
- Privacy-friendly: Locally hosted, and anonymized data in collaboration with Complianz.
- Cookieless Tracking: Get data based on anonymous parameters without storing data in browsers.
- Optimized: Built for performance and data minimization.
- Flexibility: Have your own idea how Bounce Rate should be measured? Configure your own metrics.
You can upgrade with a paid version later to get more detailed reports about your visitors.
2. Independent Analytics
Independent Analytics is a free WordPress analytics plugin that's easy-to-use, won't slow down your site, and is fully GDPR-compliant out-of-box. However, some advanced features are available only in the pro edition such as real-time analytics, WooCommerce integration, campaign tracking and email reports.
3. Koko Analytics
Koko Analytics is an open-source and privacy-friendly analytics plugin for your WordPress website. Its features include:
- No external services. Data is yours and yours alone.
- No personal information or anything visitor specific is tracked.
- Fast! Handles thousands of daily visitors or sudden bursts of traffic without breaking a sweat.
- Lightweight. Adds only 985 bytes of data to your pages.
- Plug and play. Just install and activate the plugin and stats will be recorded right away.
- Open-source (GPLv3 licensed).
4. WP Statistics
The WP Statistics is a free open-source advanced user statistics plugin for WordPress. It does not require any external dependencies and comes with many free features that include:
- GDPR-compliant.
- Online users, visits, visitors, and page statistics
- Search Engines, see search queries and redirects from popular search engines like Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, Yahoo, Yandex and Baidu
- Overview and detail pages for all kinds of data, including; browser versions, country stats, hits, exclusions, referrers, searches, search words and visitors
- GeoIP location by Country
- Support for hashing IP addresses in the database to protect your user's privacy
- Interactive map of visitors location
- E-mail reports of statistics
- Set access level to view and manage roles based on WordPress roles
- Exclude users from statistics collection based on various criteria, including; user roles, common robots, IP subnets, page URL, login page, RSS pages, admin pages, Country, number of visits per day, hostname
- Record statistics on exclusions
- Automatic updates to the GeoIP database
- Automatically prune the databases of old data
- Export the data to XML, CSV or TSV files
- Widget to provide information to your users
- Short codes support for many types of data in both widgets and posts/pages
- Dashboard widgets for the admin area
- Comprehensive Admin Manual
5. Statify
Statify is a free open-source visitor statistics extension for WordPress with focus on data protection, transparency, and clarity. Perfect as a widget in your WordPress Dashboard.
Statify provides a straightforward and compact access to the number of site views. It is privacy-friendly as it uses neither cookies nor a third party.
An interactive chart is followed by lists of the most common reference sources and target pages. The period of statistics and length of lists can be set directly in the dashboard widget.
6. WP-UserOnline
This one is a simple WordPress extension that enables you to display how many viewers do you have on your WordPress blog.
7. WP Traffic
Traffic is a full-featured analytics reporting tool that analyzes all inbound and outbound API calls made to/from your WordPress site.
At this time, Traffic can report, for inbound and outbound traffic:
- KPIs: number of calls, data volume, server error rate, quotas error rate, effective pass rate and perceived uptime;
- domains, subdomains, and endpoints details;
- metrics variations;
- HTTP codes, protocols, and methods details;
- geographical repartition of calls;
If you wanna use a third-party open-source web analytics system, you can check our other collections: