FireStats is a system for getting web statistics. You can download it from firestats.cc homepage or you can get it as a WordPress plugin for a blog.

It gives you a fascinating insight into how many hits your pages are getting, which pages are getting accesssed, how they got there, what browsers and operating systems visitors use and the IP addresses and countries of origin of your visitors. This information is useful for so many purposes.

• First, it’s very helpful to know what people are interested in on your website. The pages that people visit may be surprising. This can help you tailor your content to your customers’ needs.
• Referrers can tell you what links are good at driving traffic to your site. You can then choose to develop more links of the types that are worthwhile.
• Referrals from search engines can also be enlightening. You may have been disappointed to find that you came low down on Google for your key words, for instance. Firestats will show you what Google searches have actually brought traffic. You may find you rank surprisingly highly in searches that you would never have anticipated. If you are trying to optimise your pages for search engines, you will find some useful pointers to what text will bring visits and put you at the top of the search pages.
• The information on browsers and operating systems is very helpful when you are tweaking your site design. For example, if you have a site which looks brilliant in Internet Explorer 7, it might be a salutary shock to find that only 5% of your visitors use this. You may have to forego the effects and adapt your site to older browsers. If most visitors use Firefox, this should become your priority in designing pages. You may find that a significant proportion of visitors are using mobile devices or feed readers. This certainly calls for more thorough website design testing than you might do if you imagine your visitors are all sitting at Windows PCs using Internet Explorer.
• The Firestats information on operating systems may help you decide if your content is matching your visitors’ interests. An open-source focussed site can find it has very much more traffic than would be indicated by other web statistics generators, such as Alexa, which concentrate only on IE.
• Location information could be very important for tailoring content or for choosing which languages your site should appear in. Knowing where your customers are could be a crucial marketing tool for an e-commerce site and could help you in planning global distribution strategies. The location information seems infinitely more accurate than the information generated by Alexa for instance, as well as being 6 month more up to date,

The installation process seems relatively painless in WordPress. Once it’s installed, it’s very easy to use. You can show traffic statistics on your homepage, although I have doubts about whether this is a good idea, except for an activist site. You can adjust your settings to exclude your own visits and to ignore bots.

Altogether this is a fantastic free service. At the very least, you can see how your site is getting on, in real time. You can adjust what you offer and be able to tell very quickly whether your changes are likely to achieve what you want. You don’t need to wait months for a report from an external service. Highly recommended.

Tags: Firestats, web design, website, traffic, Software, Web Design Software, traffic analyser, site redesign, Wordpress, blogging, blog