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It’s great to know how many people visit your site each day.
But what if you want to know how many people are on your site right now?
There are surprisingly few tools that provide real-time analytics in WordPress, but we’ve pulled together a list of the best options.
The plugins included here vary greatly in functionality, but each includes statistics on your most recent visitors.
Keep reading to find our top picks.
Real-time analytics WordPress plugins
We’ve only included plugins that can be found in the official WordPress plugin repository, so these are all free plugins that have been used and reviewed extensively by the WP community.
Here are our top recommendations for the best real-time analytics WordPress plugins.
1. Independent Analytics
Plugin Description
Independent Analytics is a complete analytics solution for WordPress, and unlike most other analytics plugins, it is an alternative to Google Analytics that runs entirely in WordPress.
The free version includes reports for your pages, traffic sources (referrers), and visitor geolocations. These reports are all sortable, filterable, and searchable.
The Pro version includes real-time analytics, plus numerous other features, like WooCommerce analytics and campaign tracking.
The real-time analytics dashboard is a true real-time solution showing you how many people are on your site right now.
This dashboard includes charts showing the number of views over the past 5 minutes and 30 minutes and refreshes automatically every 10 seconds. You’ll also find “Top 10” lists for the pages, referrers, and countries from the last 5 minutes.
This report is great for seeing how busy your site is right now and can help you monitor live results from social media posts and email broadcasts.
The core Independent Analytics plugin is free, but you can still get the Pro version with real-time analytics for a steep discount of 45% while the offer lasts. This also includes campaign tracking, email reports, and WooCommerce integration.
2. Analytics Insights for Google Analytics 4
Plugin Description
If you’re not looking for a Google Analytics alternative, then the Analytics Insights for Google Analytics 4 plugin will be a good choice.
This plugin will add your GA tracking code to your site without requiring you to edit the code yourself. It then includes data fetched from the GA API to display statistics in your WP dashboard. You might find this easier than logging into your Google account every time you want to review your site’s performance.
Google Analytics includes real-time analytics showing how many people are on your site, and this WordPress plugin can display the same data in your WordPress dashboard. While the number of current visitors is displayed in WP, you’ll have to login to your GA account to see the live charts and pages visitors are looking at.
If you want to stick with Google Analytics, this plugin is a great way to get real-time analytics in your WordPress dashboard.
3. Visitor Traffic Real Time Statistics
Plugin Description
Visitor Traffic Real Time Statistics is another good option for getting visitor counts in your WordPress dashboard. This plugin has simple interfaces and a surprising amount of data.
For starters, the main dashboard shows you a graph with your daily visits and visitors, and there are some additional stats, including the number of people on your site right now. There are also reports on your visitors’ locations, the browsers they’re using, which search engines brought you the most traffic, and the search terms that brought visitors to your site.
One drawback of this plugin is that it isn’t GDPR-friendly because visitor IPs are saved in the database. However, this is still closer to compliance than a service like Google Analytics, which introduces new privacy issues due to how they use the data they record from your site.
4. Matomo Analytics
Plugin Description
Matomo Analytics is an advanced and mature website analytics platform, and they now offer a WordPress plugin for simple integration.
The Matomo platform is too vast to cover in full detail here, but a few of the most important features include daily visits and visitors, geolocations, and visitor technology reports. Matomo also includes goals, heatmaps, and funnels, which are more advanced features not found in the other plugins listed here.
While Matomo includes real-time analytics, it only gives you the number of visitors from the last 24 hours and 30 minutes. Unfortunately, there is no count of how many people are on the site right now or any charts to visualize recent activity.
5. Wassup Real Time Analytics
Plugin Description
One last plugin worth mentioning is the Wassup Real Time Analytics plugin. This plugin hasn’t been updated in some time, but it still runs fine and might get picked up and reimagined by a new developer.
While the Wassup plugin doesn’t provide a dashboard that shows visitors on your site right now, it does update the data immediately. This means you can refresh the page and see how many visitors you’ve had today.
As far as reporting goes, there is a chart showing your visits and pageviews, a pages per visit metric, and a full list of URLs visited on your site. Each visit includes the referrer (the site they came from) and the visitor’s IP address.
While it’s not our first recommendation, the Wassup Real Time Analytics plugin is one to keep an eye on for future developments.
Which real-time analytics plugin is best?
What did you think of the plugins?
Independent Analytics is our top recommendation because it’s the only plugin that displays your total active visitors, visual charts, and top pages/referrers/locations all inside the WordPress dashboard.
Analytics Insights for Google Analytics 4 is our runner-up recommendation because it can tell you how many visitors are on your site, but you need to log into Google Analytics to see the charts and active pages.
Those two plugins stand out the most in this collection, but as you’ve seen, there are other options for reporting fresh activity on your site.
Now you’ve seen the best real-time analytics plugins for WordPress, and if you still have any questions, feel free to get in touch with us to learn more.
