Top Analytics Solutions for WordPress
Making sure your website is performing up to your expectations is important. A website is only effective if people online are visiting it. You could have an amazing site that accurately reflects your brand and uses the latest design trends, but still fall short when it comes to traffic. Tracking your site’s effectiveness using some of the following analytics tools will allow you to better understand not only when to update your website, but what to change.
MonsterInsights – The Best WordPress Analytics Plugin
MonsterInsights is an incredibly popular analytics tool for your WordPress website. The plugin provides information regarding your visitors, such as gender, device, country of origin, and more. There are add-ons such as the Forms addon that allows you to track form submissions, views, and even the conversion rate. Knowing this information is invaluable as you can use it to better solve form abandonment.
MonsterInsights also displays your Google Analytics data right on your dashboard. That way you don’t have to waste time switching to the Google Analytics website. Another plus is that MonsterInsights is compatible with many, many themes. The best part is that you can download and use the plugin for free. However, there are increasingly expensive premium versions unlocking additional features.
ExactMetrics – Best Premium WordPress Analytics Plugin
ExactMetrics, which used to be known as Google Analytics Dashboard for WP, is a personal favorite of GearSite. We use this plugin all the time to track various statistics that our clients can use to make informed decisions about their website. Many beginners find the traditional Google Analytics reports to be difficult to read and comprehend. ExactMetrics solves this problem. This plugin allows you to view your reports right on your WordPress dashboard. It comes with real-time statistics so you can see who is viewing your website, where they came from, what they are doing on your website, and more.
Hotjar – Website Heatmaps & Behavior Analytics Tool
Hotjar is a little different from the other tools listed previously. It tracks how users interact with your website and has less to do with raw numbers. Hotjar provides various heat maps that allow you to easily see the parts of your website that get interacted with the most. You can also record visitors and see exactly what they did on your website, like what buttons they pressed and what pages they visited.
The information provided by Hotjar is crucial to your site’s long-term effectiveness. Taking the information you find using Hotjar and updating your site accordingly helps with user experience issues and can help funnel visitors into the parts of the site you need them to go to, namely your shop or contact page.
Listed above are three highly commendable analytics tools that can not only help you track the effectiveness of your website but also give detailed information about how visitors interact with it. The most important thing to keep in mind is that all of this information is useless if you chose not to act on it. Updating a site to improve its performance can only benefit you in the long run. So choose your analytics tools wisely, and make sure to heed their advice.
If you’d like to learn about some more must-have WordPress plugins, check out our blog post: Five Must-Have WordPress Plugins.
