Official Stats Plugin for Wordpress bloggers

Yesterday wordpress.com released the official version of their stats plugin for wordpress.org

Official Announcement : here
Download Plugin : here

Here is what wordpress has to say about it

People love their stats. Here on WordPress.com, the most popular page in the dashboard after the home page is blog stats. We now have a plugin that allows you to get WordPress.com stats no matter where you host your blog.

One of the biggest complaints we hear when people switch to hosting their own blog is that they miss the stats system. (The others are that they miss the traffic from the community, tags, avatars, and comment tracking.) There are lots of stats plugins available for WordPress.org, but many of them slow down the site because they’re writing to a DB or they show generic website stats that aren’t tailored for blogs.

We started trying to figure out a way that we could offer our stats to self-hosted WordPress.org bloggers while still keeping the system super-flexible and fast, and the new plugin is the result of quite a bit of work by our stats guru Andy. Installing the plugin is simply a matter of dropping it in your plugins directory and putting in your WordPress.com API key, then your stats will start showing up within minutes.

The way the system is set up, we’re going to be able to roll out new features like we introduced outgoing link tracking a few months ago without anyone having to update their plugin. We also have some new things in mind for the stats interface that will impact everyone, like access to more historical data and an API for mashing up traffic data with other things.

Anyway, if you’re hosting your own WordPress.org blog, be sure to try the plugin out and let us know what you think. It should only take a minute or two to install, and works fine with any other stats systems you may already be running.

Installation & Usage

The zip download only has two files - a stats.php file and a readme file. All you need to do is upload the stats.php file and once activated, update the plugin with your official API key. You will find this in the profile area of wordpress.com

You check your stats through the global dashboard on wordpress.com. The stats you can see are

• Blog Stats
• Feed Stats
• Blog Surfer
• My comments
• Tags

I’ve only been using it a day and im definately gonna keep it installed however i wouldnt use it as your main stats program just yet. I’d still use Google Analytics, Webalizer, Feedburner etc. Most of the stats sections are still in a beta stage so no down there will be a lot of upgrades in the next few months.

My main criticism of it just now is how slow the wordpress.com dashboard is. It really can be frustrating.

I’d still recommend installing the plugin and giving it a try. More stats about your blog is always good