Hey Everyone!

Today I want to discuss Website statistics plugins that try and track their own data and store up hundreds of gigabytes of space across the WA hosting network. I am going to discuss why such plugins may be hurting your website performance and delivering inaccurate data.

First let me be clear that I'm not referring to Google Analytics plugins. Google Analytics does not store any data on your server, it takes care of everything and delivers highly accurate information about your website, your visitors, your keywords, and where you are ranking.

What I am referring to are the many plugins out there that add load to your website by attempting to track data on their own (many of which do a very poor job). They can slow your website down, prevent your website from being backed up effectively, strain your server, and deliver completely inaccurate data. I've recently seen some websites that have literally ten + Gigabytes of historic data stored in your wordpress database. Each time a visitor comes to your website these plugins will actually track the visit in the database which can cause the site to load slowly. In the case of some websites it can affect your entire website performance. A slow loading website can not only hurt your website rankings, but your user experience if it's too slow.

Accuracy of data

A plugin that attempts to make sense of your website data is in many cases going to deliver you inaccurate information that could be very misleading. For example, some of the plugins out there track bots and other non-human visits to your website. This means that you may think you're getting many people to your site but in fact you could simply be getting crawled by the search engines. You could be getting crawled by bot networks trying to spam your site too. This data is erroneously delivered to you as "Visits" by most of the stats plugins out there and this is misleading.

So...what if you are using a Stats Plugin on your Site?

If you are using any stats plugins like "Statpress" or any other, we are going to help you out and disable this plugin and remove all associated data. This is going to improve your website as it will load much faster.

The highly recommended alternative is to use Google Analytics! Here is training on how to add Google Analytics to your website, it'll only take you a minute if you are not using it.

Video: Adding Google Analytics to your Website
https://my.wealthyaffiliate.com/training/manually-adding-google-analytics-to-your-website

Google Analytics has been developed by Google and is highly accurate, delivers beautiful graphs, and charts about your website data, and filters out many of the false data that you might get from a WordPress plugin.

Blocking installation of certain stats plugins. We are also going to be blocking the installation of stats plugins and save you the trouble of installing something that is not going to work. We want to encourage all members at WA to use Google Analytics for tracking stats across all of your websites. You can mange all of your sites analytics from within a single Google account so it's also very convenient.

If you have any questions about stats plugins, let's discuss them here. If you are currently using a stats plugin that is storing it's own data, it will be disabled in the coming days, so now is a great time to switch over to Google Analytics!