So you’ve got your website up and running, now how do you know whether it’s working or not? Are people visiting your site? Where do they come from, and what pages do they view?

There are several ways to get answers and statistics about your website.

WordPress Stats plugin

If your site runs on WordPress, you can install the WordPress Stats plugin. It’s a bit fiddly to install (you have to sign up for an API key, and then link it to your WordPress blog), but if your WordPress site was created by Trystal Tech, you’ll already have this up and running!

You can view the statistics of your website on the Dashboard, where you’ll see a graph of how many visitors per day, as well as a quick reference of where users are coming from, and what search terms they’ve typed in to find you.

AWStats

AWStats will show you page view statistics regardless of what you’re running on your website. Even if you use WordPress Stats, you can still find more accurate information in AWStats. AWStats is included free with any Trystal Tech hosting package.

To access your AWStats page, login to your hosting ControlPanel. You can access it via http://www.yoursite.com/controlpanel. If you don’t know your login, contact us to find out.

Once you’re logged in, find the box labeled ‘Logs’, and press the ‘Awstats’ icon. On the next page, click the magnifying glass next to your website. If you have subdomains, they have separate statistics, so select the one you’d like to view.

The statistics page will now appear, and you’ll see the colourful graph of visitors, pages and bandwidth.
Scrolling down, you can view your website visits grouped by days or hours, as well as by country.
Near the bottom of the page you’ll see a box titled ‘Connect to site from’, which shows you the sites that your visitors came from (for example, by following a link to your site).
Just under that are the search phrases used to find your website.

You can also view the results for previous months, or even the whole year, just change the month at the top of the page, click OK and wait for the stats to load.