So, you want to show general statistics on your blog or want to know data about your visitors. Then you are probably looking for ways on how to gather and / or display these statistics. Well, you have come to the right place. In this article I’ll be giving a lot of suggestions for plugins and webservices that can help you with these statistics. The suggestions are divided up into three categories, the first is about showing statistics to your visitors and the second is about obtaining statistics on these visitors for the sake of improving your blog. The third are plugins that can do both.

Showing statistics to your visitors

These plugins will show general statistics like total postcount, total comments, etc. on your blog in posts, pages or in the sidebar. The main goal is to inform your visitors about the health of your blog. Suggestions are in random order.

1. GeneralStats (Wordpress widget)

   Counts the number of users, categories, posts, comments, pages, links, tags, link-categories, words in posts, words in comments and words in pages.
   

2. Wordpress Totals (Wordpress widget)

   This will add a widget to your site that will show visitors your blog stats on how many users, posts, and comments your site has. You can configure the heading text and the before and after text of the widget. You can choose to show 1,2, or all 3 stats!
   

3. Wordpress blog Vitals (Wordpress plugin)

   Simple WordPress Stats Plugin to show Google Page Rank, Alexa rank, Technorati rank, Number of Posts, Comments, Trackbacks etc anywhere on your wordpress blog to show off to your visitors.
   

4. Complete Stats (Wordpress widget)

   This plugin, when activated, creates it’s own sidebar widget with a bunch of stats about your website in it, currently including PR and Alexa rank, with more being added. No screenshot available.

5. Blog Stats (Wordpress plugin)

   This plugin makes available a number of shortcodes which you can use in your posts, including pagerank and alexa and many more. Instead of showing these stats in a widget you are free to use the shortcodes in your posts where ever you like.
   

Gather information about your visitors

These plugins and services will gather information about your visitors. The main goal is knowing who is reading your blog so you can adjust it to your visitors even more.

1. Wordpress.com Stats (Wordpress plugin)

   Installing this stats plugin is much like installing Akismet, all you need is to put in your API Key and the rest is automatic. 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. You will need a Wordpress.com account for this.
   

2. Blog Stats by W3Counter (Wordpress plugin + webservice)

   The official WordPress Blog Stats plugin makes integrating W3Counter with a WordPress self-hosted blog easy. The plugin adds W3Counter’s real-time stats to the WordPress admin dashboard, and adds a sidebar widget for integrating the tracking code into the blog’s theme.
   

3. Google Analytics + Plugin (Wordpress plugin + webservice)

   Google Analytics is the enterprise-class web analytics solution that gives you rich insights into your website traffic and marketing effectiveness. The Google Analytics for WordPress plugin automatically tracks and segments all outbound links from within posts, comment author links, links within comments, blogroll links and downloads.
   

4. QuickStats (Wordpress plugin)

   Quick Stats is a configurable and embarassingly easy to install statistics plugin for wordpress that shows live statistics about referrer data, content hit count and browser versions back to a configurable number of hits. Individual hits are also shown with ip address and hostname. Visitors can be tracked in near real-time using an RSS reader software.
   

5. Official StatCounter Plugin (Wordpress plugin + webservice)

   StatCounter is a free web tracker, highly configurable hit counter and supplies real-time detailed web stats. The Official StatCounter Wordpress Plugin brings you all the powerful StatCounter features to your wordpress blog.
   

Gather about and show information to your visitors

These plugins will monitor your visitors but can also show information about your blog to your visitors.

1. StatPress Reloaded (Wordpress plugin)

   Real-time plugin dedicated to the management of statistics about blog visits. It collects information about visitors, spiders, search keywords, feeds, browsers etc. StatPress also includes a widget one can possibly add to a sidebar.
   

2. kStats Reloaded (Wordpress plugin)

   kStats Reloaded began as a project to redesign StatPress Reloaded into a much faster and more up to date statistics plugin for Wordpress. Using kStats you can instantly see who’s coming to your site, where they are coming from, be it another web site or one of the many popular search engines, and much more. kStats is much faster than many of its predecessors due to the fact that it takes a completely new approach to how it stores and maintains information.
   

3. Count per day (Wordpress plugin)

   Visit Counter, shows reads per page, visitors today, yesterday, last week, last months and other statistics. Features: count reads and visitors, shows reads per page, shows visitors today, yesterday, last week, last months and other statistics on dashboard, can show these statistics on frontend (e.g. on sidebar) too.