You regularly create and publish posts, but which of them are best received by your readers? And which analyses are compliant with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)? We introduce you to the Google Analytics alternative Statify for WordPress.

It's clear - A tool to analyze the statistics of your website is mandatory. This is the only way you can invest in content that really resonates with your target audience. It doesn't matter whether your website is small and simple or large and comprehensive. Or an online store with WooCommerce.

When it comes to website statistics, it doesn't make sense to rely on gut feeling. Because you can only find out whether your website is actually being visited and which posts is being read by using a suitable analytics solution.

Google Analytics: The Market Leader

Many who run a website use the market leader Google Analytics for statistics. Even if the integration sounds tempting in the first step due to the popularity, some problems arise in practice. This is because personal data is automatically transmitted to Google when the analysis data of your website is determined. And without the prior consent of your visitors, this is no longer GDPR-compliant.

In order to be able to use Google Analytics in a data protection compliant manner, a cumbersome path is necessary. This means that, among other things, an order data processing contract must be concluded with Google and all visitors, as soon as they call up the website, must be asked for permission to track.

GDPR and Tracking Cookies

At the latest since the introduction of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), it has become a challenge to collect website statistics in a data protection compliant manner. This is especially due to the tracking cookies, which may no longer be set without the explicit consent of your visitors. See for example the solution Borlabs Cookie for WordPress.

The ePrivacy Regulation, which is intended to expand and concretize GDPR , also includes the topic of data processing and data storage. It will also stipulate that tools such as Google Analytics will not be permitted in the future unless users give their clear consent. However, the ePrivacy regulation is not expected to come into force before 2023.

In order to obtain the consent of visitors, websites usually use cookie banners. This gives visitors the option of either accepting all cookies, rejecting all cookies, or only accepting individual cookies. This option means that there is a good chance that many visitors will reject all cookies. And this often makes the numbers no longer meaningful.

In addition, cookie banners are usually not designed to be particularly user-friendly. If a pop-up takes up the entire home page on both the desktop and the mobile version, or the buttons for rejecting cookies are hidden, this is rather off-putting.

WordPress Plugin Statify as an Alternative

What is the solution? Do without the statistics completely? As already mentioned, this is usually out of the question. Because the numbers are often the basis for important decisions for you or in your business. A simple and clear solution is the WordPress plugin Statify.

Statify is a plugin that is already used by many website owners. The official plugin directory of WordPress lists more than 200,000 active installations. Unlike Google Analytics and Matomo (formerly Piwik), Statify only records the page views of your website and not individual visitors including IP addresses, which are considered personal data.

Statify also records referrers. These are the pages from which your users came to your website. Statify is especially suitable for small websites that do not need detailed statistics and specific numbers. The plugin provides the call data of the past 14 days by default. If you want to increase the period, you can change this in the settings of the plugin.

In addition, you have the option to set whether you want to see the total number of calls in your dashboard or only the current day.

Advantages and Disadvantages of Statify

One of the biggest advantages of Statify is that the WordPress plugin attaches great importance to data protection. No cookies of any kind are set. So if you use Statify on your website, you usually don't need a cookie banner and active consent from your visitors, at least not for this purpose.

Since plugin does not store any personal data such as IP addresses, you are working GDPR compliant and also have less to worry about regarding the upcoming ePrivacy regulation. However, you should have this continuously checked by a law firm for online law for all your plugins if you want to be on the safe side. Because both the regulations and the WordPress plugins can change.

Statify is particularly suitable for beginners and operators of small websites, as the analyses are clearly laid out. The numbers are easy to understand and analyze. What is advantageous for many users can also be negative for larger websites. Often the basic information is not sufficient for them.

If you want to learn more about your visitors, a larger analytics solution is usually necessary. At the same time, as mentioned above, Statify only records page views and referrers. This way you won't know if visitors has visited your website only once or already ten times. The WordPress plugin Statify is therefore especially suitable for small websites or for the beginning.

Statify vs Google Analytics

The comparison of Statify and Google Analytics is somewhat lame, because both tools have the same goal, namely to provide statistics for a website. However, in practice and in terms of the wealth of information, the two tools can hardly be compared.

Just from the installation and setup, you can see that Google Analytics is a detailed and professional analytics solution. There are different steps necessary for the setup. You need to sign a data processing agreement with Google in the first step. After that, you include a cookie banner on your website, add your privacy policy and load the Google Analytics code if users agree, but not if they disagree.

In contrast, you just install Statify through your WordPress dashboard. After the installation you activate the plugin and then select the settings you need for your statistics. Directly in your WordPress dashboard you can see for example the number of hits of the last 30 days and the five most successful articles.

The focus of Statify is therefore on the number of page views. In contrast, Google Analytics provides significantly more evaluations. For example, you can see which pages and posts your readers visit, where they come from and how much time they spend on the pages and posts. Many use Google Analytics directly at the start of a WordPress project. They are often not aware that a WordPress plugin like Statify can be the much more straightforward, clearer and privacy-compliant solution.

Extend and Optimize Statify with Plugins

Statify provides standard information about page visits. If you want more than that, you can extend the statistics with the help of two other plugins. One is the plugin Statify widget. With the help of this plugin you have the possibility to integrate a widget into your website. This widget then displays the most popular articles on your website.

This provides added value for your evaluations, but also for your visitors, who can use it to access other articles. On the other hand, there is the plugin Statify Filter, with which you extend Statify with the function of a filter. This is very helpful, for example, if a website has a particularly high number of spam calls. With Statify Filter you can filter out certain data, including individual domains or pages. This gives website owners a better overview of which numbers in the statistics belong to the spam calls.

Conclusion about WordPress Statify

Google Analytics is the market leader among analytics solutions and for this reason is often automatically used as a tool for one's own statistics. The problem is that many users do not understand what exactly they are seeing due to the abundance of information and numbers. Accordingly, the analysis of these figures is also complex, especially for beginners.

That's why the WordPress plugin Statify is especially good for beginners and for smaller WordPress websites. Because the pure number of page views usually already gives a good overview. Especially in combination with the two extensions Statify Widget and Statify Filter Statify is a plugin, which should be considered by many more projects.

The biggest factor in favor of using Statify is that it enables WordPress Analytics completely without tracking cookies. So if you are looking for a GDPR-compliant way to track the page views of your own website, you should take a closer look at Statify.