If you’re serious about your website then you either are already gathering statistics on your site’s traffic or you wish you were. If WordPress is your publishing platform of choice here are a couple WordPress plugin options I use which will give you some great results with little effort.

bsuite

The first option, which I’ve been using since I started Life After Coffee is Casey Bisson’s bsuite plugin. This plugin is what puts the Top Stories in my sidebar as well as handling my tagging, showing read counts at the bottom of stories, and much more.

The bsuite plugin gives you lots of options and a comprehensive report of reads on top stories and your top days for reads. Initial setup is easy with lots of options for more advanced configuration.

Google Analytics and Google Analyticator

If you haven’t already got a Google Analytics account you’ll have to get in line. As of the time of this writing they are not allowing new accounts but you can sign up to be notified when they open up.

Once you’ve got an Analytics account you need to post a few lines of Java code into the head of your pages. This is where Google Analyticator from cavemonkey50.com comes in. This plugin will automatically insert the Analytics code in all the right places.

Analiticator setup is straight forward with some nice options. It sets up like most other WordPress plugins then all you need to do is activate it and enter your Analytics UID (provided by Google.) Most importantly, since Analyticator is a plugin it continues to work if you change themes to another plugin compatible theme (which would not be the case if you manually inserted the code.)

google analytics, analytics, stats, bsuite, wordpress, plugin, blog