It’s not often I big up WordPress plugins or extensions, but this one caught my eye: WassUp. I’ve just installed it on my blog a couple of days ago and I am utterly impressed with what this little thing can do! I have got access to my website stats aggregated via awstats and webalizer, however, since for the purpose of my blog I’m not interested in that much level of details, I think WassUp is THE stats plugin for WordPress! I just want to find out quickly for instance if there are any pages 404-ing, what are users searching for to reach my pages (for once, if certain keywords direct users wrongly to my blog, I need to tweak those pages such that they don’t appear in the results on the likes of Google, Microsoft etc — I am happy to have less readers on my blog, but ensure all of those are “qualified” users, rather than increasing my number of hits on the blog but have a huuuuge bounce rate).  I want to know what are the top performing pages — and I want to be able to exclude spiders, spammers etc when I pull these stats. And look at this, it does just that — it even signals things like the user has tried to leave comments (and failed! :D) so it’s probably a spammer:

Also, it tells me about where my users come from (the little flags on the left are the icing on the cake!) so I can quickly figure out if certain of the topics I have blogged about has reached the right audience or not. Since I fancy myself as an internet techie, I found the details about the browser/OS interesting, if not even intriguing (there are still instances of IE5 running on Win2k in Israel! and China uses IE6 on WinXP for instance, while Romania is running Firefox 7 — still the land of hackers there it seems!):

The other nice thing I like about it, is the “Show Top Stats” — where it gives me a quick overview of top search queries, pages etc — neat!

And while this gives you information about search keywords directing people to your site, there’s another extension on top of WassUp — WassUp Keywords — which aggregates these in a nice concise way:

I know serious data analytics peeps will tell me about how good certain other packages are, and I will not disagree with them — I repeat, this is a personal blog of mine, with a limited readership base, and as such at this stage I am not concerned with keeping up with processing big data in real time and anything of the kind you would do for a large-scale web site. And in this context, I think WassUp is one of the best WordPress plugins! Congratulations to michelem and helend — awesome job, guys!