Stats
Your stats page includes a bunch of nifty graphs, charts, and lists that show you how many visits your site gets, what posts and pages are the most popular ones, and much more.
Accessing Stats
- Click on My Site(s).
- If you have more than one site, click on Switch Site to select the site you want to view the stats for.
- Click on Stats to view your site stats.
When you visit your Stats page, you’ll be on the “Traffic” view by default, where you can filter your traffic to daily, weekly, monthly, or annually. The “Followers” section links to the list of people who have subscribed to your site.
Views and Visitors
What is the difference between Views and Visitors?
A visitor is an individual looking at your site. A visitor can view more than one page, or view a page on your site more than once.
The two main units of traffic measurement are views and visitors.
- A view is counted when a visitor loads or reloads a page.
- A visitor is counted when we see a user or browser for the first time in a selected time frame.
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The unique weekly visitors can sometimes be less than the sum of daily visitors for the same week. The same goes for unique weekly visitors being less than your total monthly visitors.
This occurs when the same visitor appears multiple times during the week or month.
Yearly totals are a sum of your monthly totals.
You may also notice that your visitor count lags behind your views count. This is due to the way we process the numbers.
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Typically a view is reported within five minutes. However, it can take up to two hours for new visitors to show up in your stats.
The Traffic chart also includes tabs for viewing stats for the number of likes and comments on your site. Click on the likes or comments tabs to display a bar chart for those stats.
The following traffic will not reflect in your stats:
- Visits from browsers that do not execute javascript or load images
- GoogleBot and other search engine spiders
- Visits you make to your own publicly available site (when logged into your account)
- Visits to a publicly available site by users that are logged in, and listed as members of the site
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Views by logged-in members of your site, including yourself, are only counted in your stats for sites that are set to private.
Views of password-protected posts or pages (except by owners and members of the site) on public sites will be counted in your stats. This includes views of the login page for private pages, even if the visitor does not enter the password, in which case the visitor cannot see the page, but their view is still counted. Attempts to view private posts or pages (by non-authorized users) on public sites will result in a 404 error and are not counted.
Views by Country
You can see how many views you’ve received per country by day, week, month, and year.
If WordPress.com is not able to determine your visitors’ location, their views will not be counted in this chart.
Click View all or the > icon to explore views by country in a larger chart.
Referrers
The referrers section lists other blogs, web sites, and search engines that link to your site.
A view is associated with a referrer if a visitor lands on a page on your site after clicking a link on the referrer’s site.
If you see a down arrow next to a referrer you can click on the arrow to see more specific details. For example, expanding Search Engines will show details for specific search engine referrers.
Click on the > icon to explorer the list of referrers in more detail.
Marking Spam Referrers
Where do spam referrers come from?
From time to time internet bot traffic will crawl different websites. These referrers have no impact on your site’s security, but you may not want to see them in your stats. Marking a referrer as spam removes traffic from that referrer from your stats.
To mark a referrer as spam:
- Go to your Stats page.
- Find the referrer and click on the ellipses (three dots) next to it.
- Click Mark as Spam.
The referrer link will go into your personal spam referrer block list and won’t show up in the future.
Each entry in your Referrers (except for a few whitelisted referrers, such as WordPress.com) has a clickable ellipsis next to the view count.
If you change your mind right away, you can click the Mark as Not Spam link that appears where the Spam link was previously.
However, once you have navigated away from the stats page, you will not be able to undo the action.
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Marking a site or referrer as spam will not affect your stats. It will only keep that referrer from appearing on your stats page.
Posts & Pages
This section of stats will list the Posts and Pages that have received the most views in the time period you’ve specified at the top of the page.
- A view is only counted for a post or page when the direct link of the page/post is visited or the full post is viewed in the Reader.
- If a visitor reads a post while viewing your site’s home page, the view will not be counted towards the post, only towards total views.
Search Engine Terms
These are the terms, words, and phrases people use on search engines (like Google, Yahoo, or Bing) to find posts and pages on your WordPress.com blog or site.
- The Search terms do not include the terms your readers use within your site’s Search Widget or any other search form.
- When we don’t know the search terms, we show them as Unknown search terms. Some search engines don’t reveal search terms for privacy reasons. Google, for example, has been encrypting the vast majority of search terms since 2013.
File Downloads
This section lists the files that your site’s visitors have downloaded and how many times they have been retrieved. Downloads are counted for all accepted video, audio, and document file types.
For podcast audio files, be aware that many podcast apps download files automatically. A download does not necessarily mean that the podcast has been played.
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File Download Stats is currently unavailable for sites using third-party plugins or themes on websites with Business or eCommerce plans.
Clicks
This stat counts the number of times your readers have clicked on external links that appear on your site. These may be (but are not limited to):
- Links you add to your post and page content
- Links placed in comments by your readers
- Links that appear in your blogroll
- Links attached to the names of users who comment on your site
- Links to media files
- Links to images in a gallery
Authors
If your site features content by multiple users, this stat will let you see how much traffic each of them has generated. Clicking on a name will reveal the most popular posts and pages published by each author and the number of views each has attracted.
Insights
Your Stats Insights page includes an overview of your site’s stats:
- Posting activity: a visualization of your posting trends, showing how many posts you published and when
- Most popular day and hour: what time of day and day of the week your site gets the most views
- All-time posts, views, and visitors: your site’s total posts, views, and visitors, along with your all-time best day for views
- Today’s stats: How many views, visitors, likes, and comments your site received today
- Latest post summary: How many views, likes and comments your most recent post received
- Tags & Categories: The number of views your most popular tags and categories have received in the previous seven days
Your Insights page also includes recent stats about comments on your site, popular tags and categories, and your site’s followers.
Ads
If WordAds is enabled, selecting the Ads tab will bring up statistics about ads served on your site:
- Your site must be enrolled in WordAds for this option to appear.
- WordAds is available on our Premium and Business plans
- Your site must be public for WordAds and the Ads stat section to be enabled.
- Stats for ads are fetched once a day from the ad server. They are not shown in real-time.
- Ad stats are an estimate and are subject to change. They are finalized the month following the one in which they were earned.
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To learn more about the WordAds program and the answers to many frequently asked questions, check out this helpful guide.
Downloading Stats
You can click the title of each module on your stats page, and scroll to the bottom of that module to download your stats. Simply click on the Download data as CSV link and download the file to your computer.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can I use Google Analytics?
To complement our built-in stats and to give you even more information about your traffic, you can use Google Analytics as part of the WordPress.com Premium plan or higher.
Do Site Stats include my own visits to my site?
Only for private sites. For users with private sites, your Site Stats page will show any visits that you have made to your own site, as well the visits of other users who have access to your site.
How do I find out who my followers are?
On your Insights page you will see a list of your most recent followers in the Followers module. You can use the dropdown menu in that section to switch between your WordPress.com Followers and your Email Followers, and click on “View All” to view a full list of your followers. The Publicize module also shows a list of how many social media followers receive your posts through the Publicize feature.
Why don’t post and page views add up to total views?
Post and page views are included in your site’s total views, but there are many views that aren’t tied to a post or page URL. The front pages, category, tag, date, and author archive pages, and search result pages are all examples of other views that only count towards total views.
Why doesn’t the number of referrers add up to the number of total views?
Not all visitors will land on your site by clicking a link somewhere else. Visitors may type your URL directly into the web browser, click a link in an email, or click a link in another application which then loads the browser.
Why is the number of views less than the number of likes?
Readers may like your post without visiting your site, for example on the Reader. Since they didn’t actually visit your site, liking a post in this way does not count as a visit.
Can I get stats for my self-hosted WordPress.org site?
Yes, install the official (and free) Jetpack plugin by WordPress.com.
Can I display a hit/view counter on my site?
Yes, use the Blog Stats Widget.
How can I view stats for days more than a month ago?
If navigating through the summary view, stats are only offered for the past month.
When viewing stats for a particular day, the web address ends in the date you’re viewing:
This date can be edited to jump to any date in Year-Month-Day format.
What users can see my site’s stats?
All of your site’s users can see the stats: Administrators, Editors, Authors, and Contributors. If you are on a Business or eCommerce plan and have already installed third-party plugins/themes, you should be able to access wp-admin → Jetpack → Settings → Traffic → Site Stats, and choose which user roles can see Stats reports.
What data does Stats collect about my site’s visitors?
Stats tracks and retains the following information about your site’s visitors:
- Post and page views
- Video plays
- Outbound link clicks
- Referring URLs and search engine terms
- Country
As part of collating the above information, Stats uses data like IP address, WordPress.com user ID (if logged in), WordPress.com username (if logged in), user agent, visiting URL, referring URL, timestamp of event, browser language, and country code. However, none of this information is available to site owners. For example, a site owner can see that a specific post has 285 views, but he/she cannot see which specific users/accounts viewed that post. Furthermore, the Stats logs, in which this information is stored, are only retained for 28 days.
What is the orange bar before some posts and pages in the stats screen?
The orange bar indicates the posts and pages published within the selected date range. The color of the bar depends on the “Dashboard color scheme” in the Account Settings at https://wordpress.com/me/account
I transferred my Jetpack-connected site to WordPress.com. Why are stats not working?
Please disconnect Jetpack from the old site. Then, your Stats will display correctly on WordPress.com.
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