Deprecated Content
This content is outdated. Please refer to the updated documentation here.
The first thing you should do after installing WP Statistics has configured the plugin, this is accomplished through the settings page.
Simply go to Statistics -> Settings to get there. The main settings page looks like this:
At the top are nine tabs; each one will be addressed separately.
General Settings
The General Settings page has 9 subsections; Users Online, Views, Visitors, Pages, Miscellaneous, Search Engines, Charts, Map, and Statistical reporting.
IP Addresses
The IP Addresses section contains the configuration items IP storage in WP Statistics. Note has a long-term impact on your site.
|
Setting |
Values |
Description |
|
Hash IP Addresses |
On/Off | This feature will not store IP addresses in the database but instead used a unique hash. The “Store entire user agent string” setting will be disabled if this is selected. You will not recover the IP addresses in the future to recover location information if this is enabled. Once enabled, all new visitors to your site will have their IP addresses stored as a hash; however, previous views will not be converted, and you may want to purge your old data. You can also go to Statistics->Optimization->Updates and select “Hash IP Addresses” to update old entries in the database. |
Users Online
The Users Online section contains the configuration items tracking online users in WP Statistics.
|
Setting |
Values |
Description |
|
User Online |
On/Off |
This enables/disables the tracking of users that are online for your site. |
|
Check for online users every |
Number |
If you have enabled Users Online tracking, this is how often they are checked for. If a user has not visited a page within this number of seconds, they will be considered offline. |
|
Record all user |
On/Off |
Ignores the exclusion settings and records all users that are online (including self-referrals and robots). It should only be used for troubleshooting. |
Views
The Views section contains the configuration items for tracking views (hits) to your site.
|
Setting |
Values |
Description |
| Views |
On/Off | This enables/disables the tracking of views (hits) for |
Visitors
The Visitors section contains the configuration items for the visitor tracking for your site.
|
Visitors |
On/Off |
This enables/disables the tracking of visitors for your site. |
|
Store entire user agent string |
On/Off | If you have enabled Visitors, by default, it stores the browser make, version, and Operating Systems in the database by parsing the user agent (UA) string. However, UA strings are very complex, and parsing sometimes does not work correctly. You can store the entire UA string in the database so that it can be used to troubleshoot issues. |
|
Coefficient per visitor |
Number |
This is the number of hits each visitor records for. Usually is 1. However, if you have another plug-in that causes visitors to effectively connect to your site more than once for each page view, this can be set to a lower value to account for that. |
Pages
The Pages section contains the configuration items for the page tracking code.
|
Pages |
On/Off |
This enables/disables the tracking of individual page hits. |
|
Track all pages |
On/Off |
By default, page tracking only tracks WordPress pages and posts; however, you can enable tracking of all pages (like category pages, RSS feeds, etc.) with this option. Note: this will significantly increase the pages table and make the top pages chart less useful as many system pages will likely be near the top. |
|
Strip parameters from URI |
On/Off |
By default, the page tracking code tracks every unique URI, including the parameters after the ?. This can cause the same page to be tracked as multiple unique URI’s, which may not be appropriate. This option cannot be activated if you are using the default setting for permalinks in WordPress. Likewise, if your permalink setting contains a ?, then this option will not be available. You should only enable this option if you fully understand the consequences. For example, the default behavior of WP Statistics is to track multi-page posts separately so you can see if a user reads more than one page. Enabling this option will not track these pages separately. |
|
Disable hits column in post/pages list |
On/Off |
By default, if Pages is enabled, WP Statistics will add a column to the post and page lists in WordPress and display the number of hits each one has had. This does have a performance impact, and this option will disable this behavior. |
Miscellaneous
The Miscellaneous section contains configuration items for WP Statistics.
|
Setting |
Values |
Description |
|
Show stats in menu bar |
Yes/No |
This enables/disables the admin menu bar for WP Statistics. Note: As the WP Statistics menu bar displays visitor stats, it adds load to your database for each admin page load. |
|
Hide admin notices about non active features |
On/Off | By default, WP Statistics will warn you about any primary features that have been disabled (Online Users, Views, Visitors, Pages, and GeoIP). If you have disabled a feature on purpose or cannot support the GeoIP code, this option will remove the warning. |
|
Delete the manual |
On/Off |
By default, WP Statistics stores the admin manual in the plugin directory (~5 meg). If this option is enabled, it will be deleted now and during upgrades in the future. |
Search Engines
The Search Engines section contains the options for which search engines you want to track and controlling search quires that do not contain any values. By default, all supported search engines are enabled; you may disable individual ones as required.
Note, however, that disabling all search engines is not allowed, doing so will result in all search engines being active.
|
Setting |
Values |
Description |
|
Add page title to empty search words |
On/Off |
If a search engine is identified as the referrer, but it does not include the search query, this option will substitute the page title in quotes preceded by “~:” as the search query to help identify what the user may have been searching for. |
|
Baidu |
On/Off |
Enable/disable Baidu. |
|
Bing |
On/Off |
Enable/disable Bing. |
|
clearch.org |
On/Off |
Enable/disable clearch.org. |
|
DuckDuckGo |
On/Off |
Enable/disable DuckDuckGo. |
|
|
On/Off |
Enable/disable Google. |
|
Yahoo! |
On/Off |
Enable/disable Yahoo!. |
|
Yandex |
On/Off |
Enable/disable Yandex. |
Also, note that geographic versions of the search engines are supported so that Google will include google.com and google.ca and other variations.
Developers Note:
The search engine list can be found in wp-statistics\includes\functions\functions.php in the function called wp_statistics_searchengine_list() (should be around line 297). You can add additional search engines by editing the $engines array. Details are contained in the comments above the function. All other aspects of the search engine code rely on this array, and no other aspects of WP Statistics need to be changed to support the addition or removal of search engines.
Charts
The Charts section contains the options for the display of charts in WP Statistics.
Languages
Deprecated Notice
This option is deprecated.
The Languages section contains the options for the language used in WP Statistics.
|
Force English |
On/Off |
By default, WP Statistics uses the language that the WordPress administrative console is set to display all strings. This setting will override that behavior and instead use English. |
Notifications
Common Report Options
The Common Report Options section contains options that are common to all of the sections that follow.
|
Setting |
Values |
Description |
|
E-mail addresses |
Comma separated list |
This is a comma separated list of e-mail addresses to send the report too if e-mail was selected in the option above. By default, this will be the WordPress admin e-mail address. |
Update Reports
The Update Reports section contains options for when to send e-mail notifications when various update actions occur.
|
Setting |
Values |
Description |
|
Browscap |
On/Off |
Send a report whenever the browscap.ini is updated. See the browscap tab to enable automatic updates. |
|
GeoIP |
On/Off |
Send a report whenever the GeoIP database is updated. See the GeoIP tab to enable automatic updates. |
|
Pruning |
On/Off |
Send a report whenever the pruning of the database is run. See the Maintenance tab to enable automatic pruning. |
|
Upgrade |
On/Off |
Send a report whenever the plugin is upgraded. |
Statistical Reporting
The Statistical Reporting section contains the options to email the administrators the statistics.
Note if reporting is disabled, all other related fields will be hidden in the user interface.
|
Setting |
Values |
Description |
|
Statistical reporting |
On/Off |
Enable/disable the reporting. |
|
Schedule |
Hourly/ Twice Daily/ Daily/ Weekly/ Bi-Weekly/ Every 4 Weeks |
How often to send the report. |
|
Send reports via |
Email/SMS |
How to send the report, the blog’s admin email address is used if the email is selected. To support SMS, you must have WordPress SMS (http://wordpress.org/plug-ins/wp-sms/) installed as well. |
|
Report body |
Text |
This is the report text which will be sent, you can use any short codes supported by your installation of WordPress, including the ones from WP Statistics. WP Statistics 8.0 the old variables have been removed, and the upgrade process will automatically replace them with the appropriate short codes. |
Dashboard/Overview
The Overview page has 3 subsections to it; Map, Post/Page Editor, and Widgets to Display.
Dashboard
The Dashboard section contains the options for the display of the dashboard widgets.
|
Setting |
Values |
Description |
|
Disable dashboard widgets |
On/Off |
If you wish to disable the dashboard widgets for all users, you can do so by enabling this option. |
Post/Page Editor
The Post/Page Editor section contains the widget option on the post/page editor in WordPress.
|
Setting |
Values |
Description |
|
Disable post/page editor widget |
On/Off |
WP Statistics will include a 20 days page hit chart on the post and page editor screens in WordPress. This option will disable this for your site. |
Map
The Maps section contains the options for displaying the GeoIP map on the overview page of WP Statistics.
|
Setting |
Values |
Description |
|
Disable map |
On/Off |
By default, the map is displayed on the overview page; however it can be disabled with this option. |
Access Levels
The Access Levels page has 1 subsection to it; Access Levels.
Access Levels
The Access Levels section contains the settings to control who can view and manage the WP Statistics plug-in.
What roles are available to set is dependent on your installation of WordPress, some plug-ins add roles.
The default roles in the WordPress map as follows:
- manage_network = Super Admin Network
- manage_options = Administrator
- edit_others_posts = Editor
- publish_posts = Author
- edit_posts = Contributor
- read = Everyone.
Note, each of the above cascades the rights upwards in the default WordPress configuration. For example, selecting publish_posts grants the right to Authors, Editors, Admins, and Super Admins.
For more information about WordPress roles, you can visit the “WordPress Roles and Capabilities” page at http://codex.wordpress.org/Roles_and_Capabilities.
There are also several good plug-ins to extend the roles and capabilities of WordPress, one such plug-in is Capability Manager Enhanced (http://wordpress.org/plug-ins/capability-manager-enhanced/).
|
Setting |
Values |
Description |
|
Required user level to view WP Statistics |
WordPress Role |
This will be the minimum role required to access the statistics pages. This will not provide access to the settings or optimization pages. |
|
Required user level to manage WP Statistics |
WordPress Role |
This will be the minimum role required to fully administrate WP Statistics. |
Exclusions
The Exclusions page has 6 subsections to it; Exclusions, Excluded User Roles, IP/Robot Exclusions, GeoIP Exclusions, Host Exclusions, and Site URL Exclusions.
Exclusions
The Exclusions section contains the settings to control if exclusions are recorded or not.
|
Setting |
Values |
Description |
|
Record exclusions |
On/Off |
If a page hit is excluded for any of the settings in the next several sections, it is dropped silently by default. This setting will enable aggregate recording of these exclusions so you can track spikes in the different types of exclusions. |
Exclude User Roles
The Exclude User Roles section contains the settings to control if different user roles are excluded from the statistics.
Note, by default, WordPress comes with the following roles, however, plug-ins can extend the roles available so that you may see a different list in your installation. Also, the Everyone role is excluded from this list as excluding it would effectively disable WP Statistics.
|
Setting |
Values |
Description |
|
Administrator |
On/Off |
The Administrator role. |
|
Editor |
On/Off |
The Editor role. |
|
Author |
On/Off |
The Author role. |
|
Contributor |
On/Off |
The Contributor role. |
|
Subscriber |
On/Off |
The Subscriber role. |
Developers Note:
WP Statistics builds this list dynamically, if you are writing a plug-in that adds a role to WordPress, you do not need to make any changes to WP Statistics to have it supported.
IP/Robot Exclusions
The IP/Robot Exclusions section contains the settings to control if IP subnets and Robots are excluded from the statistics.
|
Setting |
Values |
Description |
|
Robot list |
Text |
A list of words (one per line) to match against to detect robots. Entries must be at least 4 characters long, or they will be ignored. By default, when WP Statistics is upgraded, if this list has not been altered, new robots will be automatically added. However, if you have added your own robots to the list, you will have to manually add any new entries (which can be found in the upgrade section of the readme) to this list. |
|
Force robot list update after upgrades |
On/Off |
Force the robot list to be reset to the default after an update to WP Statistics takes place. If this option is enabled, any custom robots you have added to the list will be lost. |
|
Robot visit threshold |
Number | Treat visitors with more than this number of views per day as robots. 0 = disabled. Be careful of setting this number too low as you may exclude too many people from the statistics. |
|
Excluded IP address list |
Text |
A list of IP addresses and subnet masks (one per line) to exclude from statistics collection (both 192.168.0.0/24 and 192.168.0.0/255.255.255.0 formats are accepted). To specify an IP address only, use a subnet value of 32 or 255.255.255.255. IPv6 addresses can also be added in the format of fc00::/7. WARNING: This is a VERY powerful feature that can be miss configured to exclude too many hits. Be careful to use the right subnet for the addresses you want to exclude.
|
|
Use honey pot |
On/Off |
WP Statistics can use a honey pot trap page that normal visitors will never visit to identify robots and crawlers. Once identified, hits from these visitors will be excluded for the rest of the day. |
|
Honey pot post id |
Number |
The post ID of the page/post you wish to use as the honey pot, a hidden link will be added near the bottom of each page on your site. Users will not see this link, but crawlers simply parse the HTML will and then follow it. WP Statistics can create a new honey pot post by simply checking the “Create a new honey pot page” option. |
|
Treat corrupt browser info as a bot |
On/Off |
If WP Statistics finds corrupt or missing information for the IP address or User-Agent string, enabling this option will exclude the visitor/visit from the statistics. |
GeoIP Exclusions
The GeoIP Exclusions section contains the settings to control if hits are excluded based on their GeoIP information from the statistics.
|
Setting |
Values |
Description |
|
Excluded countries list |
Text |
A list of country codes (one per line, two letters each) to exclude from statistics collection. Use “000” (three zeros) to exclude unknown countries. |
|
Included countries list |
Text |
A list of country codes (one per line, two letters each) includes statistics collection; if this list is not empty, only visitors from the included countries will be recorded. Use “000” (three zeros) to exclude unknown countries. |
Host Exclusions
The Host Exclusions section contains the settings to control if hits are excluded based on their host name information.
|
Setting |
Values |
Description |
|
Excluded countries list |
Text |
A list of fully qualified host names (i.e. server.example.com, one per line) to exclude from statistics collection. Note: this option will NOT perform a reverse DNS lookup on each page load but instead cache the IP address for the provided hostnames for one hour. If you exclude dynamically assigned hosts, you may find some degree of overlap when the host changes its IP address and when the cache is updated, resulting in some hits recorded. |
Site URL Exclusions
The Site URL Exclusions section contains the settings to control if some WordPress pages are excluded from the statistics.
Note, self referrals from your own site are ALWAYS excluded from the stats. These are most commonly ajax requests by WordPress.
|
Setting |
Values |
Description |
|
Excluded Login Page |
On/Off |
Exclude the login page. |
|
Excluded Admin Pages |
On/Off |
Exclude all admin pages. |
|
Excluded RSS feeds |
On/Off |
Exclude all RSS pages from the statistics. This includes the primary site feed as well as individual post comment feeds. It should also include any custom RSS feeds that have been configured for your WordPress install. |
|
Excluded 404 pages |
On/Off |
Exclude any URL that returns a “404 – Not Found” message. |
|
Excluded AJAX calls |
On/Off |
Exclude any call to the WordPress AJAX system. |
|
Excluded URLs list |
Text |
A list of URLs (one per line) to exclude from the statistics collection. These should NOT include any GET parameters they may not match the URL you expect. |
Externals
The Externals page contains the settings to control the optional third-party services, including GeoIP data collection, browscap robot exclusions, and Piwik Referrer Spam Blacklist.
GeoIP Settings
The GeoIP settings allow you to configure the recording of country information for your visitors. This requires the download and use of an external database and is disabled by default.
Note: IP location services provided by GeoLite2 data created by MaxMind, available from http://www.maxmind.com.
Note: Referrer spam blacklist is provided by Piwik, available from https://github.com/piwik/referrer-spam-blacklist.
|
Setting |
Values |
Description |
|
GeoIP collection |
On/Off |
Enable/disable the collection of GeoIP information. |
|
Update GeoIP Info |
On/Off |
The GeoIP database is updated monthly by MaxMind, checking this option and saving the settings will download the latest database. If you want to manually download the database, you can do so and store it in wordpress/wp-content/upload/wp-statistics. Make sure to decompress it. |
|
Schedule monthly update of GeoIP DB |
On/Off |
WP Statistics can automatically download the new database each month by enabling this option. Download of the GeoIP database will be scheduled for 2 days after the first Tuesday of the month (which is when the new database is released by MaxMind). |
|
Populate missing GeoIP after update of GeoIP DB |
On/Off |
After an update to the database is done, you can have WP Statistics automatically try and find missing geolocation information for visitors in the database. |
|
Country code for private IP addresses |
Text |
The international standard two letter country code (ie. US = United States, CA = Canada, etc.) for private (non-routable) IP addresses (ie. 10.0.0.1, 192.158.1.1, 127.0.0.1, etc.). Use “000” (three zeros) to use “Unknown” as the country code. |
Borwscap Settings
The browscap page contains the settings to control the use of the browscap.ini file for robot detection. More information about browscap.ini can be found at browscap.org.
The browscap.ini database is used to detect robots and crawlers to your site. However the normal distribution is quite large as it can identify any browser, not just robots. To use the normal distribution of browscap would require and additional 5-6 meg of ram per page load.
To avoid this, WP Statistics will process the browscap.ini file and strip out all non-robot based entries. This reduces the overhead to approximately 200k per page load. However, there must be enough free disk space available to download and process the complete browscap.ini file.
|
Setting |
Values |
Description |
|
browscap usage |
On/Off |
Enable/disable the use of the browscap.ini file. |
|
Update browscap Info |
On/Off |
The browscap.ini file is update on an irregular basis, checking this option and saving the settings will download the latest file. Manually downloading the database is not recommended as it is quite large, and WP Statistics removes unused items from it for performance reasons. |
|
Schedule weekly update of browscap DB |
On/Off |
WP Statistics can automatically download the new browscap.ini file on a weekly basis by enabling this option. |
Piwik Referrer Spam Blacklist settings
Referrer spam is unwanted hits to your site by robots that impersonate users trying to insert spam links to your statistics, Piwik maintains a list of sites that use this technique, and WP Statistics can exclude these from the data collection.
Note: Referrer spam blacklist is provided by Piwik, available from https://github.com/piwik/referrer-spam-blacklist.
|
Setting |
Values |
Description |
|
Piwik Referrer Spam Blacklist usage |
On/Off |
Enable/disable the use of the Piwik Referrer Spam Blacklist. |
|
Update Piwik Referrer Spam Blacklist Info |
On/Off |
The Piwik Referrer Spam Blacklist file is updated on a weekly basis, checking this option and saving the settings will download the latest file immediately. |
|
Schedule weekly update of Piwik Referrer Spam Blacklist DB |
On/Off |
The Piwik Referrer Spam Blacklist file is updated on a weekly basis, checking this option and saving the settings will download the latest file each week. |
Maintenance
The Database Maintenance page contains the settings to control if the database is pruned with older data.
|
Setting |
Values |
Description |
|
Run a daily WP Cron job to prune the databases |
On/Off |
Enable/disable the running of a daily job to prune the database of old data. Since WP Statistics 8.2, the pruned data will be summarized into the historical database. |
|
Prune data older than |
Number |
The number of days to keep statistics for. The minimum value is 30 days. This means a number above 30 must be entered here. Invalid values will disable the daily maintenance. |
|
Run a daily WP Cron job to prune the databases |
On/Off |
Enable/disable the running of a daily job to prune the database of visitors with more than a defined number of hits per day. These hits will be removed and not added to the historical database. |
|
Prune visitors with more than |
Number |
The number of hits to remove statistics for. The minimum value is 10 hits. Invalid values will disable the daily maintenance. |
Removal
The Removal page allows you to remove the data and settings before uninstalling the plugin.
|
Setting |
Values |
Description |
|
Reset options |
On/Off |
Reset the plugin options to the defaults. This will remove all user and global settings but will keep all other data. This action cannot be undone. Note: For multi-site installs, this will reset all sites to the defaults. |
|
Remove data and settings |
On/Off |
Remove data and settings, this action cannot be undone. |
About
The About page contains version information and other details of the plugin you may find useful.
