WordPress.com hosted sites have a stats plugin that most people find instantly useful. One of the biggest complaints heard is that once you take WordPress to your own host… you lose the stats system. There is of course Google Analytics, and Shortstats… each are good in their own right. One of the problems with these systems is that they can slow down your site because they’re writing to a database.

Automattic created its own stats system, to focus on just the most popular metrics a blogger wants to track and provide them in a clear and concise interface.

Installing this stats plugin is much like installing Akismet, all you need is to put in your API Key and the rest is automatic. You can find your API key on your WordPress.com’s profile page.

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. Less is more.

Finally, because all of the processing and collection runs on our servers and not yours, it doesn’t cause any additional load on your hosting account. In fact, it’s one of the fastest stats system, hosted or not hosted, that you can use.

Download the Stats Plugin here.