When it comes to tracking your site stats, we need to set up some type of an analytics system. Now, the question is, should we run such a thing through WordPress? Should we run a tool like AnalyticsWP and run your web stats through WordPress? Is it going to be any good? Is it going to slow the site way down? Let’s go ahead and talk about that. Now, typically, I would have said never to run your analytics through WordPress itself, because the tracking mechanism for something like that might really slow down the website, and also maybe really plump up the database as well. And it’s just not a good idea. And so for that reason, I would pretty much usually have recommended to use an outside service like Fathom Analytics, Plaasible, even Google Analytics, although I’m not a big fan of using Google Analytics anymore because of how beefy it is and also all the privacy problems. I am typically a user of Fathom Analytics. It’s what I use on my own website, and I also offer it to all my clients as well. But I had the opportunity to check out AnalyticsWP, and I’m going to talk about that because I did definitely evaluate it in terms of whether it’s going to be a drag on the website.

But I also want to look at how it works and see what the advantages of it might be, because frankly, it’s pretty good. In fact, I’m now running it on my own website, and I’m probably going to keep running it. I’m not getting rid of Fathom Analytics right now, but I’m liking what I’m seeing with AnalyticsWP. So let’s go to screen and let me show it to you. All right, well, here we are inside the AnalyticsWP dashboard. Now, I just installed this maybe late afternoon time, sometime yesterday, and so I haven’t been running it real long, but it’s starting to rack up information. So you got the main graphs here, of course, unique people, total page views, average views per person. You have the Windows shopper rate, which is basically a measure of how many people come to the website and they’re not customers or anything like that. This would be there if you’re using Woocommerce, which we’ll talk about the integrations in just a minute. As you come down here, you see some of the popular refers, you see the most popular pages. Looks like my homepage is the most popular, and you see a device breakdown.

Now, one thing with this is some systems allow you to get down a little bit more granular on this information with regard to screen sizes, operating system, things like that. This does not do it. It’s just desktop, mobile, and tablet, but it is convenient. Now, under Add Query, then you can track some other things. It does have the ability to do UTM tracking, which is quite handy for pay traffic campaigns and things like that. You can also search for individual people, device type. And then when you run one of these searches, you can also save the query so that you can actually access it later on and pull these things up. One thing I do think is that that whole UTM situation right here probably should have been… It would have been nice to have a box down here where it’s a little bit more accessible. One thing that Fathom Analytics has, which is nice, is a box down here that shows the top UTM campaigns in motion. It’s just a quicker way of getting to it, and that would be nice. If you go over to Live Events, you do have a live view of anybody going across the site right now.

Obviously, as the time I’m recording this, there’s currently nobody on the site, but it does show up. I did test it. It works nicely. Under Integrations, this is one of the really nice One of the things about running analytics inside of WordPress itself is that it integrates with some of the top plugins. And in my case, Woocommerce is a big one, which means it will track and show you the order attribute And so you can actually see what the user journey was before they ordered something and things like that. It’s actually really handy. You can see that it works with various page builders as well. And then down here, you can see that it works with a bunch of different forms plugins as well. So you can track submissions and conversions through most of the popular forms plugins. I myself am a user of Fluent Forms, and so it’s automatically toggled. And that’s the one thing I also want to mention here that’s really, really handy Andy, is the process of installing analytics and tracking on your site is as simple as activating this plugin, and it just detects everything you have that it integrates with, and that’s all there is to it.

So it’s very easy to set up. And this is not something where you have to copy and paste a tracking tag and install it on the right spot or deal with Google Tag Manager or any of that. All you do is install the plugin. Now, when you go over to User Journeys, this is a cool thing where you can actually see see the activity of individual users across your site. Now, most of these are anonymous. That’s why they’re a little brown. But you can see that three of them, it knows who they are because they were going around my site while being logged in. And that’s really cool. I could actually go in here and see what individual clients or members are doing on my website as long as the system knows who they are when they’re logged in. And that’s a really neat feature. It also allows me to access this information from their user profile directly, so I don’t have to come in here and search this list of circles. I can actually pull them up right from inside their user profile. So that’s a really cool function as well. Down here are things we don’t need to access very much.

If you are running an agency, you do have the ability to track multiple sites through one install, which is cool. And then you got, of course, some basic settings. But that’s basically the gist of what analytics WP does. It’s not a particularly complicated plugin. So that’s what it does. Now let’s talk about its performance, because that’s definitely always been one of my biggest concerns with running analytics inside of WordPress. So how does analytics WP does? Well, it’s pretty clean, actually. Okay, so first of all, when you go over to their website, you look at performance and data on their page, it talks about how it actually works. And I’ll show you the database table in a minute because it’s only one single database table. It isn’t as if this thing is scattering data all over the place and making a mess. It keeps it all contained in one table, which is really nice as well. The other thing in here is that it talks about the size of the script file is only 1. 4 4 kilobite. That’s really, really small. It’s on par with a lot of the Google Analytics alternatives, such as Fathom Analytics, which I think comes in at either 1.

6 or 1. 8 kilabyte. Plausible Analytics also has a very small one. And And why that’s important is because when you’re actually scoring the speed of the site, when you’re downloading a bunch of really large JavaScripts, it slows the thing down. It increases the overall page data footprint and how much needs to be downloaded, right? So minimal is good in this case. These are really small tracking scripts. As you can see, AnalyticsWP also doesn’t try to track everything under the sun. It just tracks the ones that most people are going to care about, and it does it in a very lean and mean fashion. Now, let me also show you the database so I can show you how that actually works. Okay, so I dived into phpMyAdmin to show you the database directly. And this is what you’re looking at is the actual database table of AnalyticsWP. It’s only one single table. It has 20 fields in it. And as you can see down here, if you understand anything about database design, it’s very well indexed, which is going to lead to very, very snappy queries. It’s going to be a very, very efficient database structure.

And so the queries don’t take very long, even as the table grows. But it’s only one single table. And basically, the way that works is that every page view is going to add a new row. So over time, depending on how much traffic you’re getting, you’re going to be getting a lot of rows in this one database table. But then again, if you ever look around at your overall database, if you’ve ever done that before, you know that it’s quite common for table rows to get very, very large. And the nature of the database technology that WordPress is built on is such that it really doesn’t mind. If you go down here, you get many, many thousands of them. Here’s one with almost a half a million. That’s for campaign email tracking for Fluent CRM. You look at some of the sizes. This one is 629 megabytes. So as you can see, the stuff that AnalyticsWP is doing is nothing not being out of the ordinary at all. It’s only contained to one table, which means worst case, if you decided you didn’t want to use it anymore, you just deactivate the plugin and you can come into the database and just drop that one table and it will be like AnalyticsWP IP was never there.

So the question would be, why would you even want to use such a plugin like this? Well, obviously, for a lot of people, this is going to be a really easy option. Some people don’t want to deal with the tag, copy and pasting tags and knowing where to put it all that in order to integrate with some remote system. It does also alleviate some of the privacy concerns because you’re not sending any data whatsoever out to any third parties. It’s all staying right with your website. And that goes to also one of my other really important points about this is that this tool will maintain complete data sovereignty. It means you own all the data. And not only that, when you back up your website, which hopefully you’re doing at least every day, all of your analytics goes with the backup. It’s It’s not like you have data flung around in different places. It’s all going to be backed up at the same time, and that’s really, really handy. I will also say, I think having that user-level analytics in the customer journeys is really handy. That’s the thing that if you wanted to try to do that in a remote tool, you’re going to be dealing not only with the nerdy information on how to pass that information into a tool like that, but secondly, it’s the privacy problem.

When you start passing names and emails and stuff into third parties, you’ve got to go through the the necessary legal stuff. Whereas with analyticsWP, it’s not going anywhere. It all stays right there in the database where it should be. You obviously have very easy integration with tools like Woocommerce and forms, plugins, and stuff like that. The code is all localized. There is some developer documentation for AnalyticsWP, which means that if you got the nerdy sense to you, you probably could even do some interesting things on your own and code it and get and pull up reports in places that you wouldn’t have been able to do before. In fact, I might actually do that a little bit. And you can do that because the data is right there inside your own database. I will also note that there’s a tool that I like called Conversion Bridge. It’s a plugin that I use myself and I use it on many of my client sites, and the developers are real nice dude as well. And Conversion Bridge allows you to have real deep integration across all kinds of plugins across your site, a lot more than AnalyticsWP can do right now out box.

But Conversion Bridge will work with AnalyticsWP, and so the combination of those tool tools are going to allow you to do all kinds of really nifty things and track all kinds of stuff right inside of WordPress and make your life pretty simple. Now, anytime I do a review like this, I always like to get some feedback on some things to make the plugin better so that if and when the developers see these videos, they can get a few ideas. So a Two things I’m going to mention here that I think would make this plugin definitely better. The first one is that I believe that it should have some type of a data pruning function in order to either purge data, to maybe trim it if you want to get rid of some old historical data. I think it should probably also have an export option. These things don’t happen right now. I know that I could go into the database and get it, but I think the plugin should have something in the user interface to be able to grab the data. I also do think that the whole user journey functionality should be made optional because some people…

It’s an informed consent thing that may be required on the public side of things for legal purposes, because you actually can track individual things to individual people on the website. And just For that reason, maybe a little radio button there that just didn’t do that if the person didn’t want to. Now, one other thing I did notice is that even though in the interface, each page view is done by a user like a hash, like a session ID type of a thing. When I looked in the database, the IP address was there, meaning that the thing is actually tracking and recording user IP addresses, which brings up just the legal part of it. Again, it might be nice if there was a setting in there where we were not tracking user IP addresses if you just didn’t want to have that information in your database at all. Again, we’re not sending this information to any third parties, so that’s a good thing. However, it might go the extra mile if we could just say, Hey, let’s just anonymize everything on the site and not have any issues. I do think that even though the system has UTM tracking capability and it’s quite cool, it would be nice if they made it a little easier to get to than just having to go through the query system that it has there.

Another thing, and this is just low-hanging fruit, is why doesn’t this thing have an Admin Dashboard widget? When I log in and I go to the Admin Dashboard and WordPress, and I have all kinds of stuff on mind, that’s stuff that I want to look at every day, but I can’t put my traffic data there, that makes no sense, and it would be so incredibly easy to do. In fact, so easy to do, I’m probably going to go and code it myself and do it using AI. I’m going to vibe code that bad boy, but it’s one of those things that should be in the plugin for sure. Secondly, on that one is I think that the plugin should register some columns into the various admin listings for pages and posts and custom post types. And we should be able to one click in and view some aggregate data on any page, any post of the site, and just look at the traffic just for that page. And that’s not there, and I don’t know why. I know that I could go and run I can search for it. But again, why couldn’t I just look at my list of posts and see, or at least at the very least, have a little icon, a little analytics icon, where I could just run a report just for the traffic on that one piece of content.

And then lastly, and this is just a life life enhancement. I think it would be really cool with the data that this thing tracks now to be able to set up simple funnel tracking, where you can set up visually in the interface what a sales funnel is, specify what URL is the landing page what URL is a thank you, perhaps an upsell, things like that, and have analyticsWP run the visual report and give you the conversion rates on those things, especially if you’re using Woocomers. You’ve got the entire thing right there, but you’re just not presenting it in a beautiful funnel-like way with conversion rate data. And I think that would make things really nice. Last list, let’s check out the pricing. Well, pretty darn good, actually. $99 one time. Both of These are lifetime deals, by the way, and $1,99 if I can speak, and it’s for unlimited. So that’s a fantastic deal, a little hard to beat, and of course, you could even try it first. So they’ve made this super easy. Now, The only thing that comes to mind for me, it would be that as nice as lifetime deals are, I would always want to make sure that they’ve got enough incentive to keep on improving the plugin.

And that’s one thing about lifetime deals, that it does something Sometimes, if they’re not managing things right, become a cash flow issue on their side, and then you just wonder, Okay, are they going to keep on maintaining it? But one thing I did notice, if you come down here to the change log on their website, is that, well, they are doing things. In fact, I noticed that version 2 came out earlier this year, and they’ve released four versions so far this year in 2025. It looks like back in 2024, it looks like the features kept on coming. So so far, there’s a good track record here. I will say I would just want to make sure that that keeps on going, that they don’t blimp it up, of course, but we want to make sure that they continue to develop this because there are some things they could do to really turn this thing into What a heck of an awesome plugin. And there you have it. That’s AnalyticsWP in a nutshell. It’s a pretty nice plugin, I will say. Yes, it has a few things. I’d like to see them add to it, but as it is, it does a great job.

It’s very efficient. I’m not worried about running it on sites that even have a lot of traffic. I think it would be fine. And in fact, I’m now going to go in and put this into the Concierge toolkit and make it available to my clients. Now, in my case, I’m actually going to run both Fathom Analytics and AnalyticsWP for a while. Maybe eventually I’ll just decide, Hey, well, I think we’re good with just AnalyticsWP. But for now, I’m going to go in and run both. But I’m happy with what I see, and I think that this is definitely a worthy option for tracking your site stats in a nice, easy way. It’s beautifully integrated into WordPress. And not only that, having that data sovereignty is really, really important to be able to know that when you back up your site, you’ve got everything. That’s the way I feel about my email list because I keep everything in house, all my marketing automations, everything. It’s really nice having things that way because your site is like a little island that just has everything right there, and it’s really, really convenient. So anyway, that’s AnalyticsWP. If you have any questions, feel free to comment below, and I will let you know what I think.

Talk soon.