WordPress statistics with Statify – without tracking cookies and GDPR-compliant

Why you need statistics for your WordPress website

I am of the opinion that EVERY website needs to collect at least basic statistics. Why? Because otherwise you have no idea whether the site is being visited, which blog posts are working and which are not.

In the example with your car’s speedometer, you can perhaps still rely on “your gut feeling”. But a website on the Internet offers you no clues. Your “feeling” won’t help you.

You are flying blind without statistics.

But even if you use a fully-fledged professional tool to record every click on your website, it won’t help you if you are overwhelmed by the evaluation options. And then never look at the results.

My very pragmatic recommendation for simple, small websites that don’t run Google or Facebook ads: the WordPress plugin Statify.

This allows you to see which blog posts and pages are performing well and whether traffic is increasing – and you don’t have to worry about data protection and cookies at this point.

The problem with tracking cookies and the GDPR

Cookies are small text files that are stored on your computer by websites. This is necessary so that, for example, a shopping cart works in the store or you can log in to WordPress.

Without cookies, many functions on websites are not technically possible.

Unfortunately, cookies are also used to monitor you. You probably know the situation – if you’re looking for a new bike on Amazon, you’ll see bike ads on all the websites in the weeks that follow.

The EU has tried to prevent this with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Cookies may now only be set if you give your consent.

This image will certainly look familiar to you and shows one of the annoying cookie pop-ups:

Problem 1: very few users click on “Allow”

Even if the cookie pop-ups work with visual tricks to persuade you to click on “Accept all”, the statistics recorded sometimes collapse dramatically.

I keep hearing 40-70% in Facebook groups.

This means that your statistics tool suddenly only records every second visitor. And thus provides data that is completely useless, as it no longer says anything.

Problem 2: Cookie pop-ups are not user-friendly

I see the much bigger problem in the fact that readers are being bullied. It is not user-friendly if a pop-up overlays the page. Or on mobile devices, a third of the valuable screen space is wasted on your cookie bar.

My recommendation is therefore: avoid cookie banners if at all possible. This is an advantage for your readers and you stand out from the crowd without a cookie banner.

Advantages of Statify

Statify is a free, lean WordPress plugin that takes data protection seriously and offers the following advantages:

• No external scripts are loaded.
• No cookies are set. You therefore do not need a cookie bar or the visitor’s consent for Statify
• the statistics are clear and simple – therefore easy to understand
• Statify does not store any user data (e.g. the IP address), which would also be a data protection problem

Disadvantages of Statify

Due to its simplicity and consistent focus on data protection, Statify also has a few disadvantages:

• The statistics are very simple and only provide basic information. If you want to know more about your visitors, there’s no getting around a full-blown analytics solution.
• Statify only records page views and not visitors. So you don’t know whether a visitor has visited your site 10 times or whether there have been 10 different visitors who have read through the blog.

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Statify vs. Google Analytics

Comparing Statify and Google Analytics is like comparing a bike to a car… The bike gets you from A to B just as well, but a car offers you many more options.

Google Analytics is a full-fledged and free analytics solution, which is already noticeable in the setup. You must:

1. conclude an order data processing contract with Google
2. a cookie banner into your page
3. load the Google Analytics code if you consent to tracking and do not load it if you reject it
4. insert a note in your privacy policy
5. offer the option of rejecting tracking again (opt-out option)

Simply install the Statify plugin via the WordPress dashboard.

When it comes to analysis, Google Analytics offers many more options than Statify. You can see where visitors come from, which pages they visit and how much time they spend on your website.

In Statify you can see the number of page views.

In various comparisons, the number of page views differs by a few % between the two tools. However, this is also the case with other analysis tools – including Matomo also collects slightly different data than Google Analytics.

As you can see, the two tools are very different. In my opinion, Google Analytics is often installed without thinking. However, this also comes with many disadvantages (complex setup, legal pitfalls). Many of my clients have Google Analytics but never look at the statistics or only at the page views… so why bother?

Who is Statify suitable for?

In my opinion, Statify is particularly suitable for

• small websites
• Niche websites
• Websites that do not use online marketing (Google AdWords, Facebook advertising, etc.)
• Websites that have just been launched

So if you want an overview of how often your pages are visited, but don’t want to worry about any other setup, then Statify is the right choice for you.

Install & configure Statify

You can easily install Statify in the WordPress dashboard under Plugins > Install.

Search for Statify:

And then select the “Install now” button:

After installation, select “Activate” in the same place to activate the plugin.

Then scroll down the list of your plugins to Statify and select “Settings“:

You will then see the Statify widget in the WordPress dashboard.

My recommended settings are:

• 90 days storage
• 5 entries in the leaderboard
  Pagination via JavaScriptas caching is always active on my pages

After clicking on “Send“, your settings will be saved and you will see the widget in the WordPress dashboard:

Since nothing has been entered yet, nothing is displayed :-)

Just check back the next day and you should see some figures:

By the way, if you are logged in to WordPress, your own page views are not counted…

Statify is a basic plugin

For me, Statify has become one of my basic plugins. I now install it on all my new customer websites.

Thanks to Statify, customers can easily keep an eye on the page views of their website. You can see which pages or blog articles are particularly popular and what impact their activities have on traffic.

If this data is no longer sufficient, you can switch to Matomo (also compliant with data protection regulations), Google Analytics or another solution at any time.

With all the nice charts and figures, don’t forget one thing: the only important measurement is whether customers come to you and buy your services or products. Because many hits on the website without sales will not help you in the long term…

Let’s just build websites!

Michael

PS: do you use a different statistics tool? I look forward to your comment!