Burst Statistics – Simple WordPress Analytics (Google Analytics Alternative) vs VigIA – AI Visibility, Analytics & Control

Finally, WordPress analytics you’ll actually use Google Analytics is overkill. Most other WordPress statistics plugins are cluttered and confusing. You just want to track visitors and know what’s happening on your site, without a data science degree. Burst Statistics gives you a clean, intuitive analytics dashboard focused on the metrics that actually matter. No external analytics accounts. No complex setup. Install, activate, and understand your website traffic in seconds. Trusted by 200,000+ WordPress sites. Built by the team behind Team Updraft, known for UpdraftPlus, WP-Optimize, and All-In-One Security (AIOS). What our users are saying “Finally, an analytics plugin I can actually explain to clients.” — @anguskeystone on wordpress.org “I tried WP Statistics and Independent Analytics, but they’re overloaded and confusing. Burst’s UI is intuitive and focused on what matters to me.” — @vallered on wordpress.org Why Burst Statistics? Analytics designed to be actionable Other analytics plugins throw everything at you. Burst shows what matters, visitors, pageviews, referrers, top pages, in a dashboard you’ll actually use. No data overload. No confusing menus. See why Burst is perfect for bloggers. Privacy analytics by design All site stats stay on your server, making Burst a true local analytics solution. No external tracking. Your data is yours, we never see it without your explicit permission. Designed for GDPR compliant analytics out of the box. Read why Burst Statistics is privacy-friendly. Zero setup friction Install, activate, done. No Google Analytics account, no GA4 setup, no tracking codes, no configuration headaches. Start seeing live visitors immediately. New to analytics? Start with our guide on WordPress analytics. WordPress-native analytics Not a port from another platform. Built specifically for WordPress with native performance and seamless integration. Works with WooCommerce, blogs, business sites and membership sites. Lightweight analytics, fast by default Optimized database queries. A tiny tracking script under 4 KB. No external dependencies slowing down your pages. Designed to track accurately even when using aggressive server-side caching. See the proof in does Burst slow down my website. Features Understand your website traffic Top performing pages and posts at a glance Track key metrics: visitors, sessions, pageviews, bounce rate Breakdown of visitors by device (desktop, tablet, mobile) Filter data by custom date ranges Compare traffic between periods Search Console integration, view Google searches right on your dashboard Real-time analytics Identify the real-time source for live visitors See the specific pages users are visiting now Live count of active users on your site See what content performs Top pages and posts ranked by views Compare any date range Track individual page performance Custom conversion and goal tracking Track views, clicks and WordPress hooks Track WooCommerce analytics & sales (Burst Pro Business) Track custom events and conversions Step-by-step setup in our goals guide Privacy-friendly analytics without compromise 100% self-hosted, all statistics stored locally in your WordPress database Cookieless tracking option, a cookie free analytics setup with no consent banner required in many countries Analytics designed to support GDPR, CCPA, DSGVO, AVG, RGPD and PECR compliance No data shared with Google, Facebook or any third party Stay informed Weekly or monthly email reports delivered to your inbox Compare periods to spot trends Get notified when tracking does not work A WordPress-native Google Analytics alternative If you’ve outgrown Google Analytics, or never wanted GA4 in the first place, Burst is built for you. As a Google Analytics alternative, Burst trades GA4’s complexity for clarity. You get the metrics that matter on a single dashboard, without sampling, without data thresholding, and without sending your visitors through Google’s ad network. GA4 is built to make Google’s ad business better. Burst is built to make your website better. Curious about the full picture? Read why WordPress site owners are leaving Google Analytics behind or the head-to-head Burst Statistics vs Google Analytics. From the team behind UpdraftPlus, WP-Optimize and All-In-One Security Burst Statistics is part of Team Updraft, the team behind some of the most installed WordPress plugins on the market: UpdraftPlus – WP backup and migration plugin WP-Optimize – cache, image compression, minification and database cleanup All-In-One Security (AIOS) – security and firewall Who is Burst Statistics for? Burst works for any WordPress site, but we’ve built specific solutions for the four audiences who get the most out of it: Bloggers and content creators, see which posts resonate with your audience Entrepreneurs and small business owners, understand your traffic and campaigns without complexity WooCommerce stores, track visitor behavior, revenue and product performance Agencies and freelancers, manage analytics and reporting for multiple client sites Privacy-conscious site owners, GDPR compliant analytics without consent banners Anyone tired of Google Analytics, get clarity instead of confusion Free vs Pro Burst Statistics (free) includes everything you need to understand your website traffic. Visitors, pageviews, referrers, top content, device stats, goal tracking, email reports and more. Burst Pro adds advanced features for businesses and professionals. Compare all plans on the pricing page. CREATOR PLAN UTM campaign tracking, see which marketing efforts drive results Geographic data, country and city-level visitor insights Advanced filtering, segment data by any dimension Data archiving settings, keep your database lean automatically Priority support, direct contact with our developers BUSINESS PLAN Everything in the Creator plan, plus Full WooCommerce sales dashboard, see which content brings in the most revenue Revenue attribution, connect WooCommerce sales to traffic sources AGENCY PLAN Everything in the Business plan, plus Reporting, generate shareable performance reports for clients All Burst Pro plans include priority support. You’ll have direct contact with our developers, real humans, not a chatbot. Upgrade to Burst Pro → How Burst compares to other WordPress analytics plugins We’re often asked how Burst stacks up against other tools. Honest, short version: Google Analytics / GA4, GA4 is powerful but built for advertisers, not site owners. It’s complex, applies sampling and thresholding to your numbers, and requires a cookie banner in most countries. Burst is a simpler, privacy-friendly GA4 alternative that shows real numbers without the setup. Read the full comparison. MonsterInsights, MonsterInsights is a connector that pipes your data into Google Analytics. If you want a true MonsterInsights alternative that keeps data on your own site instead of sending it to Google, Burst is a better fit. Independent Analytics, a respectful competitor with a similar privacy-first, WordPress-native approach. Burst leans harder into actionable dashboards, deeper UTM and goal tracking, WooCommerce revenue analytics and Agency-tier reporting. Try both and pick the one that clicks. Koko Analytics, a clean, lightweight option that focuses on the basics. Burst goes further with goal tracking, real-time analytics, UTM campaigns, WooCommerce analytics and email reports. WP Statistics, a long-standing WordPress stats plugin with a lot of options. Many users find the interface cluttered. Burst focuses on a single, clear dashboard designed for clarity over feature count. Matomo, self-hostable and feature-rich, but heavier and more complex to run. Burst is the simpler, faster, fully WordPress-native option. Useful guides and resources Learn the metrics, fix common problems, get more out of your analytics. All free, all on burst-statistics.com. Getting started WordPress analytics and the metrics that actually matter How to install Burst Statistics from the WordPress Repository How to set up your first goal Privacy and GDPR Why Burst Statistics is privacy-friendly How to configure your website without a cookie banner How Burst tracks website visitors without cookies Metrics and data interpretation How to reduce bounce rate in WordPress What is bounce rate? What is a pageview? What is conversion rate? Campaigns and conversions How to track UTM (and Burst) parameters Campaign URL builder How to create and A/B test marketing campaigns with Burst WooCommerce 10 proven ways to reduce WooCommerce cart abandonment Introducing sales analytics for WooCommerce in Burst Pro Browse the full Learn hub for more. Installation Go to Plugins → Add New in your WordPress dashboard Search for Burst Click Install Now, then Activate Visit Statistics → Dashboard to see your analytics That’s it. No external accounts. No tracking codes to paste. Burst starts collecting site stats immediately. Prefer installing manually or via Composer? See installing Burst Statistics with Composer. Credits Country-level geographic data is provided by the MaxMind GeoLite2 database. This product includes GeoLite2 Data created by MaxMind, available from https://www.maxmind.com/.

VigIA (Spanish for “lookout” or “watchman”, incorporating “IA” – Spanish for “AI”) is a complete AI visibility toolkit for WordPress. Monitor 60+ AI crawlers, control access to your content, and optimize how AI systems discover and understand your site. What does VigIA do? Scores your AI visibility with a 100-point analyzer covering 20 checks across 5 categories Tracks AI crawlers visiting your site (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, and 60+ others) Provides detailed analytics with advanced filters, server-side pagination, and exportable reports with metadata banner Blocks unwanted crawlers via PHP (403 response) Manages robots.txt rules for AI crawlers with compliance monitoring Sends email alerts about crawler activity (daily, weekly, or monthly) Generates llms.txt files to help AI systems understand your site Serves markdown endpoints for posts, pages, taxonomy archives (categories, tags, WooCommerce product categories, custom taxonomies) and WooCommerce products with schema-like data Generates JSON-LD structured data with Site Identity and AI Discovery signals Exposes abilities for AI agents and automation tools (WordPress 6.9+) Key Features AI Visibility Analyzer * 100-point scoring system with letter grades (A+ to F) * 20 individual checks across 5 categories * Access & AI Discovery (37 pts): robots.txt, AI bot directives, Content Signals, llms.txt, sitemap, RSS feed * Structured Data & Semantic Context (25 pts): JSON-LD schemas, Open Graph, Twitter Cards, meta description, canonical URL * Content Structure & Readability (20 pts): heading hierarchy, semantic HTML5, image alt text, content/HTML ratio * AI Interaction & Distribution (8 pts): markdown delivery, AI share buttons * Access Performance (10 pts): TTFB measurement * Smart recommendations with direct links to VigIA features and plugin suggestions * Analyze any page on your site with URL autocomplete selector * Results cached for 24 hours with manual re-analyze option Analytics Dashboard * Total visits, unique crawlers, and pages crawled statistics * Timeline chart with daily breakdown * Category distribution (AI Training, AI Search, AI Assistant, Data Scraper) * Top crawlers and most crawled pages tables with paginated navigation * Share Buttons & AI-powered Summaries integration: see share button clicks per page * Recent activity log with content type and HTTP status columns (color coded by status family) * Advanced filters: multi-select crawler picker, content type, HTTP status code, and configurable date range * Server-side pagination with four-button pager (first, previous, next, last) — operates over the full database, not just the latest 500 rows * Period comparison functionality * CSV export with a metadata banner (site name, site URL, export type, date range, export timestamp, applied filters) * “Export filtered CSV” button that downloads exactly what the active filters return, with vigia-filtered-YYYY-MM-DD.csv filename * Content type detection distinguishes Home, Post, Page, Product, custom CPTs, Category archive, Tag archive, Date/Author archive, Feed, Sitemap, REST API, File, Admin / login attempts (/wp-admin, /wp-login.php), WordPress system (admin-ajax, xmlrpc, wp-cron, wp-comments-post), 404 Not found, and Other Crawler Blocking * Block crawlers via PHP with 403 Forbidden response * Quick block dropdown in analytics dashboard * Manage blocks from Extras page * Works on any server (Apache, Nginx, LiteSpeed, etc.) Robots.txt Management * Add Disallow rules for AI crawlers * Visual preview of your robots.txt * Compliance monitoring: see which crawlers ignore your rules * One-click blocking for non-compliant crawlers * Works with both physical and virtual robots.txt Email Alerts * Daily, weekly, or monthly reports * Three detail levels: Minimal, Normal, Complete * Non-compliant crawler warnings * Activity comparison with previous period Markdown for Agents * Serve posts, pages and any public post type as optimized markdown for AI agents * Serve taxonomy archive pages (categories, tags, WooCommerce product categories, custom taxonomies) as markdown — disabled by default, opt in per taxonomy * Dedicated .md URL endpoints (e.g., /your-post.md, /category/news.md, /product-category/electronics.md) * Accept: text/markdown content negotiation on posts and taxonomy archive pages * Discoverability via Link HTTP headers and HTML tags * YAML frontmatter for posts: title, date, modified, author, image, categories, tags, post type, lang * YAML frontmatter for taxonomy terms: title, description, url, type, taxonomy, parent, count, image (term meta), lang * WooCommerce product frontmatter adds schema-like fields: sku, product_type, price, regular_price, sale_price, currency, availability, stock_quantity, rating, rating_count, review_count * Taxonomy term body includes the term description (rendered through the_content), the list of direct child terms in hierarchical taxonomies, and an excerpt of the latest posts/products assigned to the term * Product listings inside product_cat archives include an inline summary with formatted price, “was X” on sale items, star rating and out-of-stock flag * Respects blocking rules (blocked crawlers get 403) and LLMs.txt exclusion filters * Per-term noindex detection from Yoast SEO, Rank Math, All in One SEO and SEOPress * Analytics integration: tracks markdown requests per crawler * X-Markdown-Tokens response header * Filters: vigia_markdown_post_eligible, vigia_markdown_term_eligible, vigia_markdown_term_posts_limit * Follows the Cloudflare Markdown for Agents standard LLMs.txt Generator * Select content by post type with one click * Filter by taxonomies (categories, tags, custom) * Manual include/exclude with AJAX search * Exclude by URL patterns (wildcards supported) * SEO plugin integration (auto-exclude noindex content) * Auto-regeneration (daily, weekly, monthly) * Robots.txt integration (add llms.txt and llms-full.txt references) * Generate llms.txt and llms-full.txt files * Full content or excerpt mode * Compatible with Yoast SEO, Rank Math, All in One SEO, SEOPress, The SEO Framework, and Native SEO NoIndexer JSON-LD Structured Data * Generate WebSite and Organization/Person schema for site identity * AI Discovery: ReadAction pointers to llms.txt, llms-full.txt, and Markdown for Agents endpoints * Social profiles and sameAs links for brand identity across the web * SearchAction for Google sitelinks search box * Media library integration for logo selection * SEO plugin conflict detection (Yoast, Rank Math, AIOSEO, SEOPress, The SEO Framework) * Choose output page (front page or any published page) * Live JSON-LD preview with real-time updates * Smart integration with LLMs.txt and Markdown for Agents features Supported AI Crawlers VigIA monitors 60+ AI crawlers including: OpenAI: GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, OAI-AdsBot, ChatGPT-User Anthropic: ClaudeBot, Claude-SearchBot, Claude-User, Claude-Code Google: Google-Extended, GoogleOther, Gemini-Deep-Research, Google-NotebookLM Perplexity: PerplexityBot, Perplexity-User Meta: Meta-ExternalAgent, FacebookBot, Meta-WebIndexer Amazon: Amazonbot, Amzn-SearchBot, bedrockbot Mistral: MistralAI-User, MistralAI-Index Microsoft: BingBot ByteDance: Bytespider Apple: Applebot-Extended And many more… Privacy Focused VigIA stores visitor data locally in your WordPress database. No data is sent to external servers. Abilities API VigIA is one of the first WordPress plugins to implement the Abilities API introduced in WordPress 6.9. This API allows AI agents, automation tools, and external systems to discover and interact with VigIA’s functionality in a standardized, secure way. What are Abilities? Abilities are self-contained units of functionality that VigIA exposes through WordPress’s central registry. Each ability has defined inputs, outputs, and permissions, making it easy for automation tools to understand and use them. Available Abilities VigIA registers the following abilities: Analytics vigia/get-crawler-stats – Get statistics about AI crawler visits (total visits, unique crawlers, pages crawled) vigia/get-top-crawlers – Get a ranked list of most active AI crawlers vigia/get-top-pages – Get the most crawled pages on your site Blocking vigia/get-blocked-items – List all blocked crawlers and IP addresses vigia/block-crawler – Block a crawler by User-Agent pattern vigia/unblock-crawler – Remove an existing block Robots.txt vigia/get-robots-rules – Get current AI crawler rules in robots.txt vigia/add-robots-disallow – Add a Disallow directive for a crawler vigia/remove-robots-rule – Remove a robots.txt rule Use Cases Automated monitoring: AI agents can query crawler statistics and alert you to anomalies Reactive blocking: Automation tools can block crawlers that repeatedly ignore robots.txt External dashboards: Aggregate data from multiple WordPress sites with VigIA installed WP-CLI integration: Future command-line access through the Abilities API n8n / Make workflows: Build custom automation flows using VigIA’s abilities Requirements The Abilities API ships with WordPress 6.9 and later. On older WordPress versions, VigIA works normally but abilities and MCP are not available. MCP Server (Model Context Protocol) VigIA exposes its 9 abilities as native MCP tools to any MCP-compatible client (Claude Code, Cursor, Claude Desktop, Codex CLI, Antigravity, Continue, Cline, Zed and similar) using the official WordPress MCP Adapter. The adapter ships bundled with the plugin, so the MCP endpoint is active right after installation — no Composer step or terminal access required. Requirements WordPress 6.9 or later (provides the Abilities API) Quick connect (recommended) Open VigIA > Extras > MCP and click “Generate password and connection commands”. The plugin creates a dedicated Application Password named VigIA MCP and renders ready-to-paste commands for Claude Code, Cursor, Claude Desktop and a generic block (URL + Authorization header) for any other MCP client. The plain password is shown only once. If you lose it, revoke the entry from the same panel and generate a new one. Endpoint https://your-site.example/wp-json/vigia/v1/mcp The endpoint uses HTTP Basic auth with the WordPress Application Password. The user must have the manage_options capability. Connecting Claude Code Quick Connect builds the full command for you. The shape is: claude mcp add --transport http vigia https://your-site.example/wp-json/vigia/v1/mcp --header "Authorization: Basic BASE64_OF_USER_AND_APP_PASSWORD" Claude Code merges the new entry into its config file automatically — no risk of breaking other servers. Connecting Cursor Save the JSON block from Quick Connect as ~/.cursor/mcp.json. You can also reach this file from inside Cursor at Settings → Cursor Settings → MCP. If the file already exists with other content, see the FAQ. Claude Desktop and other clients Claude Desktop does not speak HTTP MCP, so it needs a small bridge and a config file of its own. Any other client (Codex CLI, Continue, Cline, Antigravity, Zed, or your own) takes the two raw values Quick Connect exposes: the server URL and the Authorization header. Both cases are covered in the FAQ, together with how to merge VigIA into a config file that already exists without losing what is in it. Read-only mode If you only want your AI to consult VigIA (not change anything), enable “Read-only mode” in the MCP tab. While on, write actions (block, unblock, robots changes) return a permission denied error. Read actions (statistics, top crawlers, blocked items, robots rules) keep working. The toggle stores a vigia_mcp_read_only option that hooks into the vigia_can_write_via_abilities filter. Developers can still force read-only from a mu-plugin: add_filter( 'vigia_can_write_via_abilities', '__return_false' ); The mu-plugin filter at the default priority takes precedence over the toggle. Who can reach the endpoint The endpoint requires the capability to manage options, the same one every tool behind it already asked for. The vigia_mcp_transport_capability filter can lower that bar; each tool keeps its own permission check. After connecting Restart your MCP client after adding the server so it picks up the new tools. Then try a few prompts to confirm everything is wired up: “Show me VigIA crawler stats for the last 7 days.” “List the top 5 most crawled pages on this site.” “Add a robots.txt Disallow rule for TestBot and then list the current AI crawler rules.” The third example exercises a read + write + read round-trip, which is the most complete sanity check. Support Need private support or custom development? Do you need one-on-one help, priority troubleshooting, or a custom feature, integration, or tweak built specifically for your site? I offer private support and custom development. Just contact me and tell me what you need. Need help or have suggestions? Official website WordPress support forum YouTube channel Documentation and tutorials Love the plugin? Please leave us a 5-star review and help spread the word! About AyudaWP We are specialists in WordPress security, SEO, AI and performance optimization plugins. We create tools that solve real problems for WordPress site owners while maintaining the highest coding standards and accessibility requirements.