The Stat Tab… or the Tabular Stat…

The Stat Tab… or the Tabular Stat…

Today Wordpress.com announced a new feature called “Tabular Stats“. It’s an easy and immediate way to find out how your blog is performing, what visitors want and what you need to make a follow-up blog post on. While there are tons of stat widgets and plugins available, and while Google Analytics alone provide a complete solution to your blog stat needs, I appreciate this plugin because it keeps me inside the WordPress admin interface. And it’s simple.

After you download and install the plugin (you’d need your API key, by the way) , you can use it pronto. It’s just beside the “dashboard” tab.

Once it’s running it’ll begin collecting information about your pageviews, which posts and pages are the most popular, where your traffic is coming from, and what people click on when they leave. It’ll also add a link to your dashboard which allows you to see all your stats on a single page. Less is more.

Will we ever need Google Analytics, after this? That is the question!

I think the WordPress team has seen too much of the urchin code splattered across WordPress installs in wordpress.com and the user installed versions. Is this WordPress’ way of locking us in? Or a way to protect its code forest? If you’ve got a popular blog, would it slow it down? Your guess is as good as mine.