A Ride Through WP Stats

I had a bit of a sleepless night last night and decided to spend a little time wading through WordPress statistics for my blog. I am not talking about followers, but some of the more interesting statistics.

First of all, you should know there are two places to look at stats (at least for the free WordPress sites). One is seen when logging into your account through WPADMIN and the other when you simply log into WordPress. I will drop in a screen print of both so you can see the difference.

Let’s walk through the basic stats first. The screen print shows you there are two tabs, one for traffic and one for insights.

 

Traffic (Highlighted in yellow) will show you what posts you published within a specified time period (day, week, month, etc.). You will learn which posts received the most views, where your readers originate in the world, and how they were referred to your site.

Insights (highlighted in blue) on the other hand, will give you specifics as far as how many posts you average, how many views, likes and comments your latest post had, and will also tell you how many followers you have. You can click on the ‘greater than symbol’ (>) and a new screen will open allowing you to click and visit the sites of those who follow you. This is also how you can remove an abusive follower (I have never had to do that).

The leftmost WordPress menu should allow you to select WP Admin from the very bottom of the menu. Once you have selected WP Admin, your leftmost menu will change. From the top of that new menu, select Dashboard, then select Site Stats (highlighted in yellow).

Now you are in the WP Admin Statistics.

Here you can click on each day on the bar chart and see statistics for that particular day. You can also click below to see how many times your blog has been shared and to where. I was shocked to see how many times and to where my blog has been shared.

I would recommend clicking through all the tabs and arrows on these pages to just get to know who reads your blog and how well traveled it might be. If you have visitors from across the globe, you might want to consider adding a translate widget to make your blog more accessible.

Tomorrow I will show you another easy place to gain insight into your own blogging effort. I think it helps to understand a little about our followers and the performance of our own blog posts. It will definitely help pass a sleepless night now and then.