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Independent Analytics is the best analytics plugin for a WordPress site because it is simple, privacy-friendly, and free.
With that said, we’re going to look at a variety of plugins here, so you can weigh their pros and cons and figure out which one is best for your website.
Here are our top picks for the best analytics plugins for WordPress websites.
The best WordPress analytics plugins
There are two different kinds of plugins in this list.
The first plugins listed here offer a complete analytics package without any other software or accounts required (Google Analytics alternatives). The remaining plugins integrate with Google Analytics and simply display stats from GA4 inside your WP admin dashboard.
1. Independent Analytics
Plugin Description
Independent Analytics is a free alternative to Google Analytics that starts tracking visitors the moment you install it. Unlike GA, your stats show up immediately in your analytics, and you can access your stats from inside your WordPress admin dashboard.
With 100,000+ active installs and more than 145+ 5-star reviews, Independent Analytics has quickly become a darling of the WordPress community.
A major advantage of Independent Analytics is its deep integration with WordPress. For example, the Pages report lists all your pages by title, instead of by URL, making it easy to recognize and browse your top pages. It can also include each page’s type, author, category, and publication date, making advanced analysis incredibly simple.
There are a variety of reports, including the Referrers, Geographic, and Devices reports, in addition to the Pages report. They allow you to see the top traffic sources sending visitors to your site, the countries and cities of your visitors, and how much traffic you get from desktop vs. mobile vs. tablet.
Additionally, Independent Analytics is privacy-friendly and GDPR compliant. It’s able to achieve compliance because it doesn’t communicate with external servers, store personal data, or use cookies at all. This is a far cry from GA4, which stores all your data on their servers, where they use it privately for their own analysis and data collection purposes.
If you want a simpler, faster, and more private analytics solution for your WordPress website, try out Independent Analytics today.
2. Site Kit by Google
Plugin Description
If you want to use Google Analytics and integrate it with your WordPress dashboard, this is likely the best plugin for you. It lets you authenticate and connect your Google account so that your stats are pulled into the WP admin dashboard.
In addition to Google Analytics, it also includes data from PageSpeed Insights, Search Console, and AdSense. You might find it very convenient if you use all of these Google products to be able to see your traffic analytics, advertisement earnings, and website performance stats all in one place.
While this plugin works well for most users, there are quite a few that have had trouble logging in and connecting their Google accounts. If you aren’t using a new Google Analytics 4 property, it may be easier to pick another plugin that lets you copy and paste the UA code to output the tracking code.
3. MonsterInsights
Plugin Description
MonsterInsights is a popular plugin for installing Google Analytics. One of the main benefits is that you can add the tracking script by logging into Google instead of having to copy & paste the tracking code.
This free WordPress analytics plugin also embeds simple reports from Google Analytics inside your dashboard, so you can view your traffic stats without having to log in elsewhere. If you find the full dashboard intimidating or confusing, this is a nice way to get a small slice of the data in a simpler interface.
MonsterInsights also has a variety of premium plugins available for extending its functionality. You can purchase add-ons to add GDPR compliance, eCommerce tracking, custom dimensions, and more.
4. GA Google Analytics
Plugin Description
This plugin is a dependable choice for outputting the Google Analytics tracking script on your site. One of the best parts is that it supports all of the different versions of Google Analytics, so you’re not forced into using GA 4. It works with Universal Analytics, tag manager, and legacy analytics.
The functionality of this plugin is quite simple, but that’s also its greatest strength. It’s extremely easy to add your tracking code and have it output on every page of your site. You can also choose to output the tracking script in your site’s header or footer, disable tracking for admins, and add custom edits to the tracking code.
There’s also a pro version. It includes a cookie opt-out popup, lets you output custom code in the header & footer, and you can disable tracking for logged-in users. Overall, it’s a solid WordPress site analytics plugin, whether you want to purchase the upgrade or stick with the free version.
5. Slimstat Analytics
Plugin Description
If you’d prefer not to use Google Analytics, then you might like the Slimstat Analytics WordPress plugin to track visitors. It records your pageviews and referring domains, adding reports directly into your WP admin dashboard.
While the interface isn’t very modern, it does include a wealth of information. Browsing through the reports, you can quickly find your most popular pages, top search terms, and the number of pageviews VS unique IPs.
One benefit of using this plugin instead of Google Analytics is that it’s GDPR compliant. You don’t have to worry about adding a cookie optin to collect your site’s statistics, and you don’t have to create a Google account or worry about implementing the tracking code yourself.
Which analytics plugin is best?
The biggest choice you have to make is whether or not you want to use Google Analytics.
Independent Analytics is the best analytics plugin for WordPress users because it is so much easier to use than GA4 and offers superior data privacy. You can install it in seconds and start analyzing your data right away, avoiding the complex setup process and menus of GA4 entirely.
On the other hand, you should go with the official Site Kit by Google plugin if you plan on using Google Analytics for your site.
I hope these recommendations for the best WordPress analytics plugin helped you out today. If it did, please consider sharing it with someone else before you go.
Thanks for reading!
