Your Site Stats page is where you’ll go to get instant snapshots of traffic and reader activity on your site. Want to know the most popular post of all time on your site? Your Stats will tell you exactly that. Wondering if there’s a day or time when your posts generally get the most traffic? Your Stats can tell you that too.
The first thing you’ll see is a graph showing your views, comments, and likes. You can sort this graph by days, weeks, or months to get a sense of whether your blog has particularly popular times. Click on any bar in the graph to get the stats for that particular time period, and see what posts you published:
A bit farther down the page, you can see your most popular posts and pages in that time period. The orange bars on the left indicate that a post was published within the time period you’re looking at. Here, this blog’s Homepage got the most traffic, followed by the newest posts and then a collection of older content:
Further still down the page, you can look at what search terms visitors were looking for when they landed on your blog. As you can see, this blog receives an unusually high number of visitors searching for “iceberg hunters,” which explains why that post, despite being much older, is still high on the list of popular posts and pages:
Elsewhere on the page, you can see your most popular tags, categories, the countries your readers come from, your most engaged commenters, and more. On the Insights page, you can learn more about your posting frequency, and even see the most popular hour of the day for your blog.
If you’re just starting out, you probably won’t have a lot of meaningful stats to look at, and that’s okay. For now, focus on creating more and varied blog posts about your blog topic, using keywords and tags to help boost your site visibility in the Reader and search engines, and sharing your content on social media.
As you progress in your blogging journey and continue to post consistently, you’ll start seeing more useful data on your Stats page. Early on, you might feel like your stats still aren’t high enough to tell you much about your readers — that’s fine. You can still look at your popular categories and posts, and start experimenting. You may want to set a reminder for yourself to analyze your stats in a few weeks or a few months as your audience grows. This is another good task to add to your site assessment process.
You can learn a lot from your stats, but you can also dwell on them too long — if you find yourself getting emotionally invested in your stats, rather than just using them as a tool, try taking a step back for a while.
Your statistics are a measure of what readers react to and how they find you, not of your worth as a blogger. Having 5,000 loyal, engaged readers is as much a function of your activity in the community and the serendipity of the internet as of the quality of your blog. There are lots of factors you can’t control that still plenty influence your stats: If most of your readers are local, a particularly gorgeous afternoon that drives them outdoors can cause a precipitous dip, while a few well-timed Facebook shares can send the graph skyward.
If you’re serious about growing your readership, you’ll want to track normal fluctuations and understand what causes the spikes. But despite their significance, it can be a good idea to limit your stat exposure.
In the early stages of blogging, monitoring stats can give you a great confidence boost — it’s proof that someone, anyone, is reading (and later, proof that someone other than your mother is). As your blog matures, it becomes dangerously easy to let your stats dictate how you feel about your own posts. An essay you’re particularly proud of is no less an accomplishment because it attracts few readers — but that can be hard to remember, and expectantly clicking over to your stats every 15 minutes doesn’t make it any easier.
Our suggestion? Moderate your stat visits. We know it’s tempting, with the Stats page just a click or two away, but limiting visits to once a day or once a week is great for mental health.
Keeping stats at arm’s length is also a great way to re-assert ownership of your blog. Sure, we love it when other people read, like, and comment, but many of us started our blogs because we had something we wanted to express. Readers or no readers, your site is still your space, where you’re free to explore and create. Cutting down your stats consumption is a helpful way to remember that you blog for yourself, not for other people.
Best of all, this gives you the headspace you need to publish your best. When you’re confident in your writing, photography, or art and are creating exactly what you want to create, you do your best work — which is more likely to attract readers. Win-win!
Google captures a lot more granular data about site activity, and at some point in the future, as your blog audience grows, you may be interested in diving into more detail about your blog traffic.
If your site is on an upgraded plan, you can connect your Google Analytics account to your WordPress.com site. For more information on how to do that, follow the step-by-step instructions on this support page.
Click to explandResources
- Your Website Metrics and Stats Explained (Article)
- Website Health: Use WordPress.com Stats for a Checkup (Article)
- Stats and Insights (Support Guide)
- Google Analytics on WordPress.com (Support Guide)
- WordPress.com Plans (Support Guide)
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