WordPress Plugin: WP-StatPress
by Ade Magnaye on December 8th, 2008 
12 Comments
I’ve used various plugins and webapps for measuring my site statistics on my WordPress blogs. Each one has its own merits and disadvantages of course, but whether you choose a plugin that will give you stats from an external server or one that will render reports from your own database, it’s really up to you. I, for one, prefer using WordPress in-server plugins to check my stats. Nothing beats real-time updates. I’ve gone through lots of plugins, but for now I am loving every bit out of WP-StatPress.
According to the site, WP-StatPress is the free plug-in for WordPress dedicated to the real-time management of statistics about blog visits. It collects information about visitors, spiders, search keywords, feeds, browsers, etc.
As you can see, data is presented in a way that is easily understood right away, especially by the novice. This is what makes WP-StatPress stand out. Upon opening WP-StatPress, you immediately see a graph showing your traffic for the month, something that other plugins lack. There is even a “Spy” function, that will let you check who is currently on your blog and what pages are they visiting.
StatPress also includes a widget one can possibly add to a sidebar, or you can use PHP if you’re not into widgets. And this is what sold WP-StatPress to me: it can automatically delete older records to allow the insertion of newer records when limited space is present. It will help you fight database bloat that’s present in other plugins. It can halp you trim down your database without going to PHPmyadmin.
If you like what you see, you can try and download WP-StatPress here and leave a comment if it works the way you want it to, or if you want it to add more features.
UPDATE: Apparently WP-StatPress is no longer updated by the developer. Thankfully, Pascal was able to point us to a fork/continuation of the WP-StatPress project, StatPress Reloaded.
Maybe you didn’t see that, but the plugin isn’t supported anymore by the creator. But today is your lucky day: There is a new StatPress plugin called StatPress Reloaded which includes many bug fixes.
You’ll find it in the plugin repository: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/statpress-reloaded/
Thank you Ade and Pascal – I have it up and running. Now if I can just get a few people to visit my site so that I have some STATS!!!. . . . .
I’ve been using StatPress Reloaded. It’s a nice plugin!
Another nice WP stats plugin is Wassup – http://www.wpwp.org/, which I’ve been using on our blog for the last few months.
Worth a look!
Wow I was searching for a plugin which gives real time stats for my blog. right now I’m using w3counter.com wp plugin for real time stats and wordpress.com stats plugin for other stats. I have used wassup also but it seems to slow down the site a bit taking about half of the bandwidth. Now I’ll try out statpress.
My observation only, if there was a “remind me about the followup comments”, it would be great to follow the convo.
good info. thank you
they disabled the database, and to re-enable my database, I will need to correct some queries in my code, This specially for wordpress statpress pugin.
They say my database is causing the shared resources to be over-utilized. This, in turn, affects the usage by other customers.
I have no idea how can this happen, anyways.. it’s related to statpress plugin, so should I remove it to make those customers happy?!
There is another great stat plugin: StatPressCN, you should give it a try.
Thanks! Good news :)
StatPress is an absolutely horrid plugin to use. I’m a MySQL DBA for a major world-wide internet hosting company and I see people using StatPress on their WP blogs and it kills the performance of the server, and their site. Not only does it store massive amounts of data (if you don’t change the settings), but the database design is just downright horrible. Additionally, the StatPress Reloaded plugin does not resolve any of the design flaws prevalent in the original StatPress plugin. Tables and columns that are regularly queried are missing integral indexes that can improve performance. Additionally, all data fields are by default TEXT (TEXT or TINYTEXT in SP Reloaded) data type, which is BAD! This plugin should be avoided at all costs until the developer can fix these huge mistakes.
By changing a few data types and adding a couple indexes, I’ve taken queries from this plugin from examining 140k plus rows, down to examining less than 1800 rows, a 78% decrease in rows examined. I recommend “Google Analytics for WordPress” or “Wordpress.com Stats” (the latter requires an API key from wordpress.com, the former is obviously used in conjunction with Google Analytics, which is a great stat tracking software).
I’ll agree that the features of the plugin are nice, including the real-time monitoring, the GUI, and the sheer amount of data collected. However, the design flaws mentioned previously can spell disaster for your website, especially if it is a popular site.
After poking around a bit with the plugin itself (I’m hoping to improve on it further and will let you know if/when I do), I retract my previous statement that this is a horrid plugin. The plugin itself is nice and has some great features and incredibly useful data. However, the way it goes about getting and storing that data is what is bad. The database design itself is bad and causes major problems, if left unchecked. However, if repaired, it can make this plugin much better and your site won’t suffer performance because of it. If I get around to fixing this plugin, I’ll be sure to post here.