Statpress is a statistics plugin for WordPress
There are many other similar products available as plugins for WordPress, but I’m going to talk a little about why these plugins are bad for your site’s performance and could cause you problems. I’m also going to offer you a great alternative.
Statpress
Over the last few days I had a problem with a popular site I look after for a client. I had installed Statpress and in recent months the site performance had slowed considerably.
The site is hosted on a shared server (one of those cheap ones with several other hundred hosting accounts), and so I thought the performance could have easily been caused by overcrowding or the performance of another site.
I was surprised to find that the hosting account was suddenly suspended due to a terms of service violation, and digging a little deeper discovered that the performance hit I was experiencing, was also affecting several hundred other customers hosted on the same box with me.
The source of the problem – according to the hosting company who had investigated the problem – was Statpress. The solution was to remove the offending plugin, and they dutifully removed the suspension of the site.
The site performance improved immediately.
The issue did get me thinking about the way these plugins work, and how it impacts performance of sites. Software like Statpress records a lot of information each time a page is hit, and this information needs to be written to the database.
It figures that as a site becomes more popular, not only does the CPU and database get an increased hit from the traffic, that hit is multiplied by the effort of recording all that statistical information.
Effectively popular sites are being punished by the plugin for being popular.
Where I landed is that third party reporting like Google Analytics is far better, because the load of recording statistics is not borne by the site serving the content. So then, how could I get the same convenience of dashboard statistics for my client?
I did a little bit of research and found a great plugin called Google Analytics Dashboard that gave me quite similar stats on the front page of the dash. The detail remains in Google Analytics.
Google Analytics Dashboard widget
As for setup it’s very simple with OAuth – simply log the site in and select the profile you wish to track.
Some additional features include the ability to determine who can see the stats dashboard widget. It can be offered at every level from Subscriber (not recommended) through to just Admins.
So if you’re using a plugin like Statpress and you’re suffering performance problems, perhaps it’s time to rethink the way you record and display your stats.
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