Static home page *and* Home / Archives are logging on stats

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  jamesriddett · Member · Apr 23, 2014 at 10:30 am

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  A couple of weeks ago, we switched from having the home page as the posts page, to having a static home page and having the posts at happyguide.co/blog.

  Looking at today’s stats (23rd April 2014), WordPress.com appears to be logging two different “home” pages.

  The first entry is for “Start your journey to happiness today…” and links to happyguide.co/home. This link actually redirects to happyguide.co as its set as the static front page.

  Then there is another entry for “Home page / Archives”. This links to happyguide.co which doesn’t make sense, as the home page isn’t the posts page.

  I can only imagine that the second entry is actually referring to the Blog page (and category etc) views, but that doesn’t explain why the stats entry links to the home page.

  Can you please clarify? It’s impossible to confidently track the effectiveness of our home page without this information. Thank you!

  The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)

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  jeremeylduvall · Member · Apr 28, 2014 at 2:51 pm

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  Hi James!

  All of your home page visits should now be recording under the page “Start your journey to happiness today…”. However, archive page views are still counted under “Home page/Archives”. So, if someone visits the following link:

  http://happyguide.co/category/mindset/

  Or any other category archive on your page, the view will be counted under the Home Page/Archive title.

  Please let me know if you have any additional questions!

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  jamesriddett · Member · Apr 28, 2014 at 3:25 pm

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  That’s great, thanks for the clarity Jeremey, much obliged.

  Just a suggestion, but for a site with a static front page, it might be better to label posts page/archive views as the name of the assigned “posts” page, rather than “Home page/Archives”.

  In our case, our posts page is titled “Blog” so the stats entry would be:

  Blog/Archives

  And clicking it would take you to the posts page (happyguide.co/blog).

  I think that would eliminate any confusion about which stats entry refers to home page visits, for sites with a static front page. I know other WordPress.com site owners who had the same query as me.

  The only possible drawback I can think of is that if, as we did, we switched from “blog as home page” to static front page, your blog stats would become split under two different entries, on the day you switched:

  — Home page/Archives
  — Blog page/Archives

  But I think that would be absolutely fine.

  Thanks again for your help,
  James

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  jeremeylduvall · Member · Apr 28, 2014 at 8:40 pm

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  Hey James,

  I can definitely see where that would be valuable. If you don’t mind, can you add it to our Ideas forum here?

  https://en.forums.wordpress.com/forum/ideas

  We monitor that forum for suggestions and improvements when we’re considering new features or revamping current ones.

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  jamesriddett · Member · Apr 28, 2014 at 8:59 pm

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  Have added it under ideas here…

  https://en.forums.wordpress.com/topic/in-stats-re-label-home-page-archives-if-site-uses-static-front-page?replies=1

  Many thanks Jeremey.

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  jeremeylduvall · Member · Apr 28, 2014 at 9:10 pm

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  Thanks for adding that James!