Parse.ly vs SlimStat Analytics

Designed and built for digital publishers, Parse.ly helps you understand how your audience is connecting to your content. Thousands of writers, editors, site managers, and technologists already use Parse.ly to understand what content draws in website visitors, and why. Using our powerful dashboards and APIs, customers build successful digital strategies that allow them to grow and engage a loyal audience. Join industry leaders — like NBA, Slate, News Corp, and Condé Nast — who already use Parse.ly to bring clarity to content, audience, and analytics. Feedback, suggestions, questions or concerns? Open a new GitHub issue or email us at [email protected]. We always want to hear from you! NOTE: The plugin requires an active Parse.ly account. Sign up for a free Parse.ly demo. Features The wp-parsely plugin is packed with features that allow for a seamless integration process, and brings the power of the Parse.ly dashboard into WordPress. Automated integration The plugin automatically inserts the Parse.ly metadata and JavaScript in all published pages and posts (Custom Post Types are supported). It also provides a settings page to customize your integration, with options including: – Output Parse.ly metadata as JSON-LD or repeated meta tags. – Choose whether logged-in users should be tracked. – Define how to track every Post Type (as Post, Non-Post or no tracking). Parse.ly Content Intelligence Content Intelligence is a set of content insight tools including: – The Parse.ly Dashboard Widget – Displays the site’s top posts in the WordPress Dashboard. – The Parse.ly Stats Column – Displays published post performance for the last 7 days in Post Lists. – The Engagement Boost feature – Helps you increase page views and engagement by strategically placing links to key content within high-performing articles on your site. – The Parse.ly Editor Sidebar – This sidebar is integrated into the WordPress Editor and offers insights about the content currently being edited such as: – Title Suggestions – Generates title suggestions for the post/page currently being edited. – Smart Linking – Automatically adds links to the current content that point to the most relevant and top-performing posts. – Related Posts – Displays a list of the website’s most successful posts, similar to the post/page currently being edited. – Performance Stats – Displays performance metrics about the content currently being edited. – Excerpt Suggestions – Generates an excerpt suggestion for the post/page currently being edited, from the Excerpt panel of the Post Editor’s settings. The Parse.ly Recommendations Block The plugin includes a Recommendations Block that displays a list of posts related to the currently viewed post/page. The Block is useful for showcasing related content to visitors, and it can also be used in Site Editing mode or as a Block-based Widget. Advanced integrations support While the plugin works out of the box for basic integrations, it offers a host of features that easily allow for advanced integration scenarios: – Support for Google Tag Manager, AMP, Google Web Stories and Cloudflare is included. – The plugin exposes the wpParselyOnLoad and wpParselyOnReady JavaScript hooks that allow for advanced integrations requiring JavaScript, such as Dynamic Tracking. – Support for WordPress network/multisite and decoupled/headless (GraphQL and WP Rest API) setups is included. – Last but not least, a wide range of hooks is available in order to customize the plugin’s functionality even further. Documentation and resources Plugin Documentation. Commonly Asked Questions. Changelog. IMPORTANT: If you are a WordPress VIP customer, please consult the WordPress VIP documentation for more details. Sample Parse.ly metadata The standard Parse.ly JavaScript tracker inserted before the closing body tag: A sample JSON-LD structured data for a home page or section page: {"@context":"http:\/\/schema.org","@type":"WebPage","headline":"WordPress VIP","url":"http:\/\/wpvip.com\/"} A sample JSON-LD meta tag and structured data for an article or post: {"@context":"http:\/\/schema.org","@type":"NewsArticle","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"http:\/\/wpvip.com\/2021\/04\/09\/how-the-wordpress-gutenberg-block-editor-empowers-enterprise-content-creators\/"},"headline":"How the WordPress Gutenberg Block Editor Empowers Enterprise Content Creators","url":"http:\/\/wpvip.com\/2021\/04\/09\/how-the-wordpress-gutenberg-block-editor-empowers-enterprise-content-creators\/","thumbnailUrl":"https:\/\/wpvip.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/04\/ladyatdesk.png?w=120","image":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https:\/\/wpvip.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/04\/ladyatdesk.png?w=120"},"dateCreated":"2021-04-09T15:13:13Z","datePublished":"2021-04-09T15:13:13Z","dateModified":"2021-04-09T15:13:13Z","articleSection":"Gutenberg","author":[{"@type":"Person","name":"Sam Wendland"}],"creator":["Sam Wendland"],"publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"The Enterprise Content Management Platform | WordPress VIP","logo":"https:\/\/wpvip.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/11\/cropped-favicon-dark.png"},"keywords":[]} Contributing Development, code hosting and issue tracking of this plugin happens on the wp-parsely GitHub repository. Active development happens on the develop branch and releases are made off the trunk branch. To run the plugin locally or to contribute to it, please check the instructions in the CONTRIBUTING file.

Most analytics plugins quietly hand your visitors to someone else’s cloud. SlimStat doesn’t. Every pageview, click, and visitor lands in your own WordPress database and stays there: yours to read in real time, yours to purge whenever you want, never shipped off to Google or anyone else. See the whole story the moment it happens: who’s on your site right now, where they are in the world, what they’re reading, and which links they follow on the way out. Set a goal and watch it convert, or chain a few steps into a WooCommerce funnel and see exactly where people slip away. It’s the depth you’d expect from a hosted analytics service, running entirely on your own terms. Best part: privacy isn’t a setting you have to hunt for. Anonymized IPs, Do Not Track, a consent banner, and scheduled data cleanup are GDPR-ready from the first activation. Thousands of WordPress sites already trust SlimStat to keep their analytics honest, fast, and entirely their own. Main Features Real-time access log — Your site’s pulse, live. Watch each visit land the instant it happens: the page, the spot on the map, the search or link that sent them, how quickly your server replied, human or bot. Complete access log — Every visit in one searchable table. Drill into the full history and break it down by date, country, browser, OS, referrer, search term, or content type to answer the questions the summary charts can’t. Goals & funnels — Turn raw traffic into answers. Define a goal to measure a conversion (a WooCommerce sale, a signup, a key pageview) and see uniques, totals, and conversion rate. Or chain steps into a funnel to spot exactly where visitors drop off. One goal is free; up to five goals and full funnels unlock with Pro. Outbound link report — See which external links actually earn clicks. SlimStat records every outbound link your visitors follow, so you know what’s sending traffic off your site and which partnerships pull their weight. Know your visitors — Go past pageviews to the people behind them: returning readers, logged-in users, and a full audience breakdown by country, language, browser, OS, and screen size. (Pro’s User Overview adds per-visitor journeys, time on site, and Gravatars.) Your data, your server — No third-party cloud, no Google looking over your shoulder. Every byte lives in your WordPress database, and one-way IP hashing lets you count unique visitors without ever storing who they are. GDPR, sorted — Anonymize or hash IPs, honor Do Not Track, auto-purge old records on a schedule, and drop in a translatable consent banner that snaps straight into the WP Consent API (WPML and Polylang welcome). Compliance by design, not an afterthought. Admin bar stats — Keep an eye on the numbers without leaving your work. Online visitors, pageviews, and top pages sit one glance away in the WordPress admin bar, on every screen. Make every report yours — Rearrange, add, or hide widgets across Real-Time, Overview, Audience, Site Analysis, and Traffic Sources until each screen shows exactly what you care about. Shortcodes — Drop any report into a widget, post, or page with a single shortcode. Filters — Decide who counts. Skip your own team, known bots, whole IP ranges, admin pages, or entire countries so your stats reflect real visitors, not noise. Geolocation — Put a city and country to every visitor, plus their browser and operating system, powered by MaxMind and Browscap. World map — Watch your audience light up across the globe at a glance, even from your phone (map by JQVMap). Export & email — Download your reports as CSV files, generate user heatmaps, or get the day’s numbers in your inbox each morning (heatmaps and email reports via Pro). Cache-friendly — Plays nicely with W3 Total Cache, WP Super Cache, Cloudflare, and most caching plugins. Pro Pack Features Love the free plugin? Pro is for sites that live by their numbers. It adds the heavier tools without changing a thing about how SlimStat respects your data: Email reports — Wake up to the numbers that matter. Schedule the reports you care about and have them land in your inbox as clean HTML tables, with the columns laid out your way. Heatmaps — See exactly where visitors click, and where they don’t, with a heatmap layer painted right over your live pages. User overview — Follow individual registered users: what they viewed, how long they stayed, and how fast your server answered, with Gravatars to put a face to the visit. Extended overview — Add your own columns to the User Overview report and export file, so it tracks exactly what your site cares about. More goals & funnels — Up to five conversion goals and three full funnels, with ready-made templates for WooCommerce checkout, signups, and content engagement. Network analytics — Run reports and settings across an entire multisite network from one place. MaxMind integration — Connect MaxMind’s geolocation API for richer, more precise detail on where your visitors come from. Custom database — Store all your analytics in a separate, external database to keep your main WordPress DB lean. Export to Excel — Download any report as a ready-to-share Excel file. Requirements WordPress 5.6+ PHP 7.4+ MySQL 5.0.3+ At least 5 MB of free web space (240 MB if you plan on using the external libraries for geolocation and browser detection) At least 10 MB of free DB space At least 32 Mb of free PHP memory for the tracker (peak memory usage) Please note If you decide to uninstall Slimstat Analytics, all the stats will be PERMANENTLY deleted from your database. Make sure to setup a database backup (wp_slim_*) to avoid losing your data. Report Bugs Having trouble with a bug? Please create an issue on GitHub. Kindly note that GitHub is exclusively for bug reports; other inquiries will be closed. For security vulnerabilities, please report them through the Patchstack Vulnerability Disclosure Program. The Patchstack team will validate, triage, and handle any security issues.