Statify as a Data Protection-compliant Statistics Alternative for WordPress

Not least because of the current general uncertainty regarding the GDPR and the need for cookie banners, the desire for website statistics that do not collect personal data and should therefore fly under the radar of the GDPR is likely to be great among WordPress website operators. The Statify plugin promises to be such a statistic. It wants to provide a general overview that is limited to a few key data. The depth of a statistic like Matomo or Google Analytics should not be reached, whereby most operators of smaller and locally-oriented websites usually neither need nor can interpret the wealth of detail of these cars.

I use Matomo on my website myself, but recently at least switched off the recognition of visitors to (presumably) not have to set a cookie banner. For me personally, this only has the effect that visitors can no longer be distinguished from visits: both key figures have been identified since then, as visitors are no longer recognized.

To be able to offer my customers a certain statistic in addition to the Google Search Console without having to run Matomo, I also installed Statify at the same time. In this article, I would like to compare the results of my observations so far.

First of all, it should be mentioned that web statistics generally do not represent reality in hard, reliable numbers, but can only show more or less precise trends. There are too many imponderables, too many ways of defining and measuring certain factors like page views, etc., to ever get absolutely reliable figures. Visitors can cancel the loading of a page - at what point was it access? You can stay 5 seconds, you can change the browser tab and ignore the page for half an hour and never look at it, you can read it carefully, but reload it three times every now and then ... Each statistic is based on the decisions of the respective programmer about which events and when and how to count. There are also more or less effective filters against bots,

Statify at a Glance

Statify does not want to be complete statistics, but to clarify the most important questions for many website operators: which of my pages and posts are actually visited? And where do they come from?

The Statify plugin itself only puts a small widget in the backend:

The widget shows a curve of the page views per day. The measured maximum number of accesses per day is displayed at the top left (here: 268). The best sources are the websites/search engines the visitors came from, each with the number of visitors measured there. Another list contains the hits on "Best Content", ie pages and posts, but also categories and other automatically generated content.

These statistics only reflect very rough data; the larger the observed period is set, the fewer details are visible. For example, if a new contribution were to be very well received, it would still be difficult to compete with evergreens. You can only set a retention period for the widget - unlike other statistics, you cannot, for example, compare the data from a year and the last two weeks. It is therefore important to find a good compromise value and, if necessary, to take notes over a longer period of time.

Since there is no storage of personal data, not even the IP address, and visitors are also not recognized, this form of statistics should not pose a problem from the point of view of data protection.

Useful addition: the "Statify - Extended Evaluation" plugin

The plug-in for the "Statify - Extended Evaluation" plug-in offers a little more data and, above all, a better overview. It is anchored in the backend on the left in the column and offers an overview/year view, a separate view for displayed content in which a period can be defined, as well as a view for the sources, referred to here as "references". Although the associated tables (at least for me) appear badly formatted, so that the headings of the columns are much further to the left than their data, you can overlook that.

The view of the most popular content in Statify - extended analysis.

Below is an exportable tabular representation of all content

The ability to focus on time periods, in particular, expands the possibilities of the plugin considerably. You can now define a large retention period for the data and still check shorter periods from it.

The clear separation of pages and posts is particularly useful for WordPress: in addition to the general view, which can also contain categories and tags, the table of contents also has a tabular view for pages and only for posts. And in the overview of the references, a specific page or article can also be selected to see which sources refer to this particular content.

Incidentally, Statify has over 100,000 installations, but this extension plugin only has over 4,000 - a lot of benefits are given away here.

Other Statify plugins include a widget for display on the website itself and a blacklist extension that you can use to block your own IP lists. I have not installed these two.

Direct Comparison: How Does Statify Fare Against Matomo?

Matomo monitors significantly more data than Statify. In the following, I therefore only use the results from Matomo in the areas that Statify also monitors with the extension plugin. These are primarily the side views.

I compared the data from both systems for a week. The first thing that caught my eye was that the page views counted in Statify are consistently higher than those measured by Matomo. Statify has an average of one and a half times as many hits as Matomo, on the most extreme day it was even 205%, i.e. a little more than twice as many. This could be undetected bot access. I would assume that Statify is likely to be able to exclude known search engine bots from the statistics so that the additional visits would then be more bots from the dark side of the field, i.e. spambots and those that check the website for security problems.

I guess that bots don't have to open pages and posts in search of security holes, but rather do their job via direct access to plugins with known problems, etc. These should therefore automatically bypass the statistics. Spambots do access pages and posts to post comments. However, during the time I was monitored, there were only about 20 pieces that were blocked by Antispam Bee, which is by no means sufficient to explain the discrepancy.

Also, I can observe that the spambots primarily honor older pages and posts, most of which are among the less successful. So they are more likely to cause deviations at the lower end of the statistics.

Of course, it is just as possible that many visitors block Matomo, for example by using the opt-out solution. At this point, I cannot decide which mere set of figures is closer to reality.

In any case, the lists of the most successful pages from Statify, Matomo, and even the Google Search Console currently match perfectly in the order of the pages listed for the same period of time, there are only a few additional results here and there in between. Statify should therefore at least be able to provide correct information about the relative popularity of pages and posts as well as the origin of the visitors. That should be completely sufficient for many purposes.

Sideline Data Protection Declaration

I would like to mention one little thing that catches my eye when dealing with statistics. We mainly go through this whole fuss because the GDPR requires it and data protection is increasingly being pushed through with warnings and complaints. So I was interested in the question of how many people are even interested in my privacy policy when I, for serious criminals, don't even have a cookie notice, let alone a banner? Also, the local opt-out option for Matomo can be found in the data protection declaration, and I assume that the visit will remain tracked at least until the opt-out.

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The result is clear: no pig is interested in the data protection declaration. So far this year I've only had 38 hits on it in Matomo, that's 0.0015% of the total page views. In the period also monitored with Statify, there are 2 in Matomo, but 4 in Statify. Given that the data protection declaration does the most work with constant updates, its use is therefore significantly limited.