The StatPress Reloaded WordPress plugin – Track your Visitor’s and enjoy Statistics

When running a blog it is interesting to see who is visiting ones website, where these visitors come from and what they do onsite. Since all versions of WordPress do not come with any visitor statistics so far, every blogger or blog owner has to implement his own solution to track visitors and display statistics.

Different kinds of WordPress visitor statistics are available: External tools such as Goole Analytics or Woopra, WordPress internal plugins such as StatPress Reloaded, CyStats or WassUp and mixtures of internal and external tools, such as the WordPress.com stats plugin, that stores and computes all data on the WordPress.com servers but can easily be integrated into ones blog.

This blog post is about the blog integrated plugin StatPress Reloaded. I will start with a description of the plugin in general, then point out its advantages and disadvantages and finish by giving a conclusion.

Introduction to StatPress Realoaded

The StatPress Reloaded WordPress plugin is maintained by Manuel Grabowski. It is based on StatPress, which was originally developed by Danielle Lippi. It is not very flexible but it offers the mostly used standard statistics directly in the dashboard:

• main facts about today, yesterday, the current and the last month
• last pages that have been accesses (last hits)
• last searchphrases visitor’s have used, leading to a visit of your site
• last referrers and get to know where your visitors come from
• last spiders that have crawled your website

Further statistics are available in the “details” page of the StatPress Reloaded menu:

• days with the most unique visitors, visitis, hits/pageviews
• operating systems and browsers used by visitors
• accessed RSS feeds
• search engines used by visitors
• top search terms and referrers
• etc.

A special “visitor statistics” page delivers further insights to where the last visitors came from and what they have done on the blog.

The current version of StatPress Reloaded is 1.5.21. Following Manuels posts in the StatPress Reloaded support forum, he’s planning an entirely new version of StatPress Reloaded. StatPress Reloaded can easily be downloaded from the WordPress.org plugin directory.

Advantages of StatPress Reloaded

Since StatPress Reloaded is entirely part of the WordPress installation, all data is owned by the owner of the blog. StatPress Reloaded comes in multiple languages (about 18…), is easy to install and delivers lots of different statistics.

Disadvantages of StatPress Reloaded

The most important disadvantage of StatPress Reloaded is its database structure. As long as there are only about one hundred visitors per day taking a look at the blog, there is no problem. But as soon as the number of visitors rises the performance of StatPress Reloaded decreases; luckily especially in the administration panel only.

Another disadvantage of StatPress Reloaded is that there are a lot of browsers, operating systems, spiders, etc. StatPress Reloaded does not know. The only chance to correctly assign these is to add them manually to specific files in the plugin’s directory or to pray that they are part of the next version of the StatPress Reloaded plugin. There is no webserverice or something similar that can be asked for updates.

As said, the most important statistics are available, but there’s no easy way to take a look at the development of visits or hits over the last weeks for example. Additionally, the dashboard is not customizable.

Taking a look from a programmer’s perspective, the plugin’s program code lacks a good structure and does not seem to be well maintainable and expandable. This might be a sign that one should not wait for too huge improvements of the current version.

Conclusion

StatPress Reloaded should be good enough for WordPress blogs that do not have too much visitors and do not require too complex web analytics. If the new version of StatPress Reloaded (StatPress Reloaded Reloaded?) will ever be finished, it might be a huge improvement and overcome the current disadvantages.