So you’ve been using your blog for a few weeks and would like to find out who your visitors are, where they come from and what pages they look at. You need a stats plugin for this and there are a variety of these you can choose from. Here are the cream of the crop:

• WordPress.com Stats – This is the big daddy of WordPress stats plugins brought to you by the same people who produce WordPress and the most excellent Akismet. It actually runs on WordPress.com so you’ll need an API key to make it work, but this is easily obtainable once you create a WordPress.com account. It offers a single-page view of your stats and integrates with your Dashboard so it’s ideal for a quick view of what’s going on.
• Google Analyticator – If you want real depth in your stats Google Analytics offer one of the richest set of information. This plugin helps you integrate them effortlessly into your WordPress blog without needing to touch your theme, then you have the full force of Google Analytics available to you.
• StatPress – While the 2 plugins above use external services via Javascript to generate stats, this plugin actually records every hit that your blog gets. It’s a more accurate representation of how busy your server is, but also counts things like bots and spiders which aren’t real people. These stats can be pretty interesting in themselves, but be aware that on a busy blog recording these stats can prove to be quite an overhead.
• WassUp – Another in-built stats plugin that lets you analyse visitors to your site and provide a real-time view of what’s going on. This one looks quite interesting and has an avid community behind it. It includes a real-time view in AJAX that’s a cool way to keep an eye on what’s going on.
• QuickStats – This is a lightweight statistics package that runs within WordPress without the luggage of a fully-fledged statistics package. It’s not designed to fully comprehensive, but rather a quick way to get an idea of what’s going on with your blog, how many visitors you’re getting and what pages are being used most on your sites.

That’s a quick round-up of the top statistical plugins you can use for WordPress today. As you can see, the methods used by each vary, so different plugins will work better for different people depending on what sort of information you are after. The best thing is that they’re all free, so you can try them out and if you don’t like them just switch to another one.

So, was that comprehensive enough? Do you use a stats plugin that’s not listed here?