Stats and Insights
Your Stats and Insights page includes a bunch of nifty graphs, charts, and data to show you how many visits your site gets, which posts and pages are the most popular, and much more. This guide explains how to read and understand your site’s stats and insights.
Accessing Stats
Click on Stats in your dashboard to view your site stats. If you have more than one site, click on Switch Site to select the site you want to view the stats for.
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” counter links to the list of people who have subscribed to your site’s posts.
Traffic
Views and Visitors
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.
A visitor is an individual looking at your site. A visitor can view many different pages of your site or view the same page multiple times. Therefore, the views number is typically higher than the visitors number.
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.
You may also notice that your visitor count lags behind your views count. This is due to the way we process the numbers. 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.
Yearly totals are a sum of your monthly totals.
In the graph, the bar highlighted in a different color indicates the time period (day, week, month, or year) currently selected in the graph. The stats for this time period will display below the graph. Clicking on another bar in the graph will select that bar’s time period, and the information below the graph will update to display that time period’s statistics.
How Traffic is Counted
The following traffic will not reflect in your stats:
- Visits you make to your own publicly-available site while logged into your WordPress.com account.
- Visits from browsers that do not execute javascript or load images.
- Googlebot and other search engine spiders.
- Visits to a publicly available site by users that are logged in, and listed as members of the site.
If your site is set to private, views by you and other logged-in members of your site are counted. If your website is plugin-enabled you can control which user views will be counted in your stats for private sites by going to Jetpack → Settings → Traffic. There you can change the “Count logged in page views from” setting for each user role in the Site Stats section.
Views of password-protected posts or pages (except by owners and members of the site) on public sites will be counted in your stats. If they do not successfully enter a password to view the page, they will be sent to a 404 error page and will not see the content that is password-protected.
Likes and Comments
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.
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.
Post and page views are included in your site’s total views. But they may not add up to your Total Views. There are many views that aren’t tied to a post or page URL. The category, tag, date, and author archive pages, and search result pages are all examples of other views that only count towards total views. In your stats, this shows in “Home page / Archives”. Take into account that if you have a static front page on your site, this section can refer to:
- Your blog (posts) page, if you have one for your site.
- Any blog archives page, such as posts from a particular month, in a particular category, or by a particular author.
Any views of your site’s static front page are listed under that page’s title.
What is the colored bar next to a page or post title?
You may notice a bar next to a particular post or page title. Depending on the color you’ve assigned your Dashboard the bar may be blue, or orange, or another color. The colored bar indicates the posts and pages published within the selected date range.
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.
Take into account that every file request is recorded in your stats. The download count also increases when the file is opened directly in the browser or the download did not finish at all. Your own requests are also recorded.
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.
⚠️
File Download Stats is currently unavailable for sites using third-party plugins or themes.
Views by Country
You can see how many views you’ve received per country by the day, week, month, and year.
If WordPress.com cannot determine your visitors’ location, their views will not be reflected in this chart.
Click the > icon at the top to explore views by country in a larger chart.
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
Referrers
The referrers section lists other blogs, websites, 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 (Google, Bing, and more.)
Click on the > icon to explore the list of referrers in more detail.
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The number of referrers may not match 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.
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.
Authors
This stat will let you see how much traffic each author has generated, which can be helpful if your site has multiple users. Clicking on a name will reveal the most popular posts and pages published by each author and the number of views each has attracted.
Can Authors see my stats?
All of your site’s users can see the stats: Administrators, Editors, Authors, and Contributors. If your site is plugin-enabled, you can go to Tools → Marketing → Traffic → Site Stats, and choose which user roles can see Stats reports.
Insights
The second tab, after Traffic, is Insights. Your Insights page includes an overview of your site’s stats so that you can view and learn from long-term trends.
The Insights screen shows the following information:
- Posting activity: A visualization of your posting trends, showing how many posts you published and when.
- All-time views: A color-coded table showing the total views in a month and the average views per day in a month.
- Latest post summary: How many views, likes, and comments your most recent post received.
- Most popular day and hour: What time of day and day of the week your site gets the most views.
- Tags & Categories: The number of views your most popular tags and categories have received in the previous seven days.
- Annual site stats: A summary of your site’s activity for the current year to date.
- Follower totals: The total number of followers you’ve received from WordPress.com accounts, email subscriptions, and your connected social media accounts.
- Followers: A list of your most recent followers.
- All-time posts, views, and visitors: Your site’s total posts, views, and visitors, along with your all-time best day for views.
- Comments: View a list of people with the most comments on your site a list of the most-commented posts and pages.
- Publicize: The number of followers on each of your connected social networks.
Ads
If WordAds is enabled, selecting the Ads tab will bring up statistics about ads served on your site:
Important information to keep in mind about the Ads stats:
- Your site must be enrolled in WordAds for this option to appear.
- WordAds is available on our Pro, Premium(legacy), Business (legacy), and eCommerce (legacy) 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.
To learn more about the WordAds program and the answers to many frequently asked questions, check out this helpful guide.
Downloading Stats
You can download reports of your Stats as a CSV file by following these steps:
- Go to Stats in your dashboard.
- Click the title of a module on your stats page, such as Posts & pages, Referrers, Countries, etc.
- Scroll to the bottom of the screen.
- Click on the Download data as CSV link.
- Save 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 Pro plan, and legacy Premium plan or higher.
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 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 daily traffic 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. For example, https://wordpress.com/stats/day/yourgroovysite.com?startDate=2021-06-11 where 2021-06-11 is the day being viewed.
This date can be edited to jump to any date in Year-Month-Day format.
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.
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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