People love their stats. Here on WordPress.com, the most popular page in the dashboard after the home page is blog stats. We now have a plugin that allows you to get WordPress.com stats no matter where you host your blog.

One of the biggest complaints we hear when people switch to hosting their own blog is that they miss the stats system. (The others are that they miss the traffic from the community, tags, avatars, and comment tracking.) There are lots of stats plugins available for WordPress.org, but many of them slow down the site because they’re writing to a DB or they show generic website stats that aren’t tailored for blogs.

We started trying to figure out a way that we could offer our stats to self-hosted WordPress.org bloggers while still keeping the system super-flexible and fast, and the new plugin is the result of quite a bit of work by our stats guru Andy. Installing the plugin is simply a matter of dropping it in your plugins directory and putting in your WordPress.com API key, then your stats will start showing up within minutes.

The way the system is set up, we’re going to be able to roll out new features like we introduced outgoing link tracking a few months ago without anyone having to update their plugin. We also have some new things in mind for the stats interface that will impact everyone, like access to more historical data and an API for mashing up traffic data with other things.

Anyway, if you’re hosting your own WordPress.org blog, be sure to try the plugin out and let us know what you think. It should only take a minute or two to install, and works fine with any other stats systems you may already be running.

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