Just to be crystal clear, this post is all about displaying basic statistics about your site, not about your visitors. So if you are thinking something like, “duh, just use Google Analytics or whatever,” then imagine a giant buzzer sound telling you that you’re incorrect. Sure, Google Analytics gives you information about your visitors, like how many, where from, how long, and so forth. But GA et al do NOT provide information about your site itself. Things like the number of registered users, number of posts and pages, number of comments, and all the other cool little details about your site. That is what we’ll be covering in today’s DigWP tutorial. So grab some popcorn and enjoy the show! ;)

In my recent post, DIY WordPress Popular Posts, I share a simple, two-step technique for tracking and displaying popular posts on your WordPress-powered site. That post describes everything needed to fully implement DIY popular posts, but some folks wanted an easier (more convenient) way to display the list of popular posts on the front-end (instead of using template code).

Over at my code snippets site, I keep track of the most popular posts and display a list in the sidebar. It’s an easy way to highlight the site’s best content and share top snippets with visitors. There are numerous plugins available for displaying your site’s popular posts, but they tend to be overkill and/or employ weird algorithms that are just unnecessary and not always accurate.

For example, a lot of plugins and techniques calculate popular posts based on number of comments. These days I’m just not sure if that’s a relevant measure of popularity. Some sites have comments disabled, and other sites receive very few comments in general, so going the comment-count route just doesn’t work.

What I wanted was a simple way of counting hits and displaying a simple list of the most popular posts. This DigWP tutorial explains how to do it with two easy steps. Sound good? Let’s dig in..

Delivered on Google’s “world-class platform,” Google Analytics is a powerful way to monitor your site’s statistics. As flexible content-publishing software, WordPress provides a variety of ways to add Google Analytics (GA) to your web pages. These techniques range from including the GA tracking code directly to using plugins that are easy to customize from within the WP Admin area. In this DigWP post, we cover it all with 5+ ways to add Google Analytics to your WordPress-powered site.

Hello WordPress peeps! Did you know that WordPress makes it super-easy to display some basic statistics about your database performance? The information may be displayed publicly on your web page, slightly hidden in your source code, or entirely private so only you can see it. There are two basic statistics that are drop-dead easy to include on your pages: