Troubleshoot your website stats

Your stats show how many people visit your site, where they come from, and which content performs best. This guide answers common questions about your site stats and helps you resolve anything that looks unexpected.

If your stats show zero or haven’t changed, the cause is usually a processing delay, the selected date range, or that the page hasn’t had countable visitors yet—not lost data. Work through these checks in order:

1. Wait a few minutes and refresh. Views are usually reported within five minutes, but new visitors can take up to two hours to appear.
2. Check the date range at the top of the Stats page. A range with no traffic shows zero, so set it to “Last 7 days” or “Last 30 days” to confirm data is recording.
3. Confirm the post or page is published. Draft, scheduled, and private posts record no public views.
4. Visit your own published site in a private or incognito browser window. Your own visits while logged in are not counted, so a logged-out visit is the quickest way to test that tracking works. Your view appears in your stats within a few minutes.

A page can also read zero because it hasn’t had visitors yet, or has had only a few that weren’t counted. Visits from browsers that block the stats pixel (for example, through an ad blocker) won’t be picked up. Stats are measured on a sampling basis, so a page with very little traffic can show zero. To build steady, countable traffic to your content, see increase your site’s traffic.

Your view count is normally higher than your visitor count, and this is expected. A view is counted every time someone loads a page, while a visitor is counted once per time frame, so one visitor usually adds several views. Visitor numbers can also lag, because a view is reported within about five minutes but a new visitor can take up to two hours to appear. For the full explanation, see views and visitors.

WordPress.com stats and Google Analytics will always show different totals, and neither is wrong. The two tools count traffic in different ways:

• Jetpack Stats uses a tracking pixel that records page loads and filters most known bots.
• Google Analytics uses JavaScript that runs in the visitor’s browser.
• WordPress.com stats do not count views from logged-in site users by default, while Google Analytics usually does.
• Time zones, ad blockers, and spam-referrer filtering also shift the numbers.

Compare trends over weeks and months rather than exact daily totals. If you’ve connected Google Analytics but see no data after 24–48 hours, confirm you haven’t added the same tracking ID in two places (for example, through both a plugin and the WordPress.com setting), and review the setup steps in Connect to Google Analytics.

Sudden spikes and unfamiliar referrers are usually automated bot traffic, not real readers. A strong sign is a high views-to-visitors ratio—for example, hundreds of views from only a handful of visitors in a day. This traffic does not harm your site, your SEO, or your real readers.

Jetpack Stats filters most known bots, but some appear before the filters catch them. To reduce the effect on your stats, mark suspicious referrers as spam and review your trends over weeks rather than single days. For more detail, see about bot traffic.

A sudden drop in views that stays low is usually caused by changes outside your site, not by a problem with your stats or your content. The traffic a page receives depends on many external sources—search engines, social networks, and links from other websites—so a change in any one of them shifts your numbers. Some rise and fall is a normal part of how traffic works.

These external factors are the most common reasons traffic drops and stays lower:

• Search engines: Search engines regularly update how they rank pages, and interest in a topic naturally rises and falls with the season. A change in either can move your search traffic up or down.
• Social networks: A post that was being widely shared eventually stops circulating, and social platforms change how often they show links. Traffic from a social network often climbs and then settles.
• Links on other sites: When another site that linked to your content removes the link, updates its pages, or goes offline, the referral traffic from it drops too.

To find what changed, open your traffic sources and compare the weeks before and after the drop. The Referrers and Search terms cards show which source changed, which usually points to the cause. Review your traffic over weeks and months rather than single days, because a longer view shows the real trend.

It’s also worth confirming your site is still visible to search engines in your site visibility settings. Once you know which source changed, you can work on rebuilding traffic.

If stats show zero or won’t load in the Jetpack mobile app, the data is usually fine and the issue is the app’s connection or view settings. Try these steps:

1. Pull down on the Stats screen to refresh, then close and reopen the app.
2. Check the date range or period selected at the top of the Stats screen.
3. Confirm you’re logged in to the correct WordPress.com account for the site.
4. Update the app to the latest version from your device’s app store.
5. Open the same site’s stats at the dashboard in a web browser. If the numbers appear there, the issue is limited to the app.

If a card like Search terms, Authors, or Videos is missing from your Stats page, it’s usually hidden in your view settings rather than broken. To show a hidden card:

1. Visit your site’s dashboard.
2. In the sidebar, click on Stats.
3. Click the settings icon at the top right of the Traffic page.
4. Under “Modules visibility“, toggle on the card you want to show.

Some cards also depend on your plan. UTM parameters and device stats, for example, require an eligible plan.

If you can’t see stats from further back in time, the limit is usually your plan, not missing data. Stats access depends on your WordPress.com plan:

• Free sites can view the last seven days of views, visitors, likes, and comments.
• Personal plan sites and higher can view all-time traffic and filter by date range.
• Premium plan sites and higher unlock the full stats suite, including UTM and device stats.

To see older data, upgrade your plan. WordPress.com began recording stats in 2007, so visits from before then were never tracked.

Yes. When you move your site, our support team can merge your existing stats into the destination site so your view and visitor history carry over. A stats merge works in both of these cases:

• Moving from one WordPress.com site to another.
• Moving between a WordPress.com site and a self-hosted, Jetpack-connected WordPress site, in either direction.

To request a stats merge, contact support and include the address of both the original site and the destination site, and tell us which direction you’re moving.