Beef with WordPress Stat Pluins.

I’m always interested in know were were my visitors are coming from and how they got here. I have tried many Stat options. WordPress.com Stats, Fire Stats, and Live Stats. What you might not think of is the load on your Database. One visit might be minute but depending how how the Stats are set up to record the meta data you could be storing a couple kilobytes per visit.

Whats a couple KB you say? well if you take your IP address, the date, the page you landed on, the page you came from, and ID# and more than likely some other information will be captured. All this for every visit. Now think about how many page views you get and for how long you used the script.

In my case i used them for a few months, never really looking at them all that much because i perfected Google Analytic’s. I was shocked to see a 22mb Table for Live Stats.

I would suggest using Sticking to some form of off site Statistic Application such as Google Analytic or WordPress.com stats now i cant say for sure that the large Database size created by these stats plugins will cause WordPress to act sluggish. but since i have basically started from scratch i can say that it is running much faster.

In short, Don’t use WordPress Stat plugins unless they are off site. Another good point to make is to all the WordPress plugin developers out there, Make a uninstall for you plugins, many don’t clean up after them selves once you have deactivated them.