Best stats plugin for WordPress: ShortStat

This is just my opinion, based on what I was looking for, which is: a very simple WordPress blog plugin for gathering and reporting stats like unique and total hits, referrers, and search keywords. I wasn’t interested in a heavy-weight stats program. I already use Google Analytics, but for this blog I wanted a plugin to put exactly the stats I’m interested in on my WordPress dashboard.

ShortStat does exactly what I want.  It’s a simple and (as of this writing) actively-maintained WordPress stats plugin that provides a quick dashboard link, putting your stats a mere click away.

In the first image, you can see the plugin presents you with unique and total hits per day (RSS feed hits broken out separately).  Here is another screenshot:

Left side of the screenshot shows search engine keywords that people have used to find your blog.  Right side shows hits per blog post.  This is very useful data.  Reviewing the keywords is particularly interesting and important if you care about how people are finding your blog.  It also helps you understand how search engines are indexing your blog posts, which is valuable for SEO.  The keyword stats might also give you ideas about how to expand upon topics you’ve covered, based on what people are searching for.

What other stats does ShortStat display?  It shows referrers (search engines or other sites/blogs linking to you), OSes, and languages.  You may be surprised to find many international visitors to your blog!

So, what is the best stats plugin for WordPress?

If you want easy access to exactly these data sets, ShortStat is the best.  That’s my opinion.  I’ve had it installed for several days now, as you can see in the first image, and I’m quite happy with it.  You may even become a little bit addicted to checking your stats!

If you have a blog on web development, programming, design, etc. feel free to contact me about exchanging links.  I’m looking to build out my blogroll.