How to View WordPress Stats by Category

You know which posts are most successful, but which categories are getting the most views?

Viewing the stats for your categories will help you understand where visitors are browsing and which topics they’re most interested in.

With the right tools, this data is easy to come by.

In this tutorial, you’ll discover:

• A free plugin to track visits to your categories
• How to see the number of visitors each category gets
• How to check the stats for posts in a specific category

By the time you’re done, you’ll have all the inspiration you need to draft and publish your next 100 articles!

Let’s begin with how you can track category data on your site.

How to track visits to your category pages

The first step is to start tracking visitors to your site. While you may have a tool like Google Analytics installed, it requires additional code and configuration to report on category traffic and stats for posts in a category.

That’s one of the reasons we developed Independent Analytics, a free WordPress analytics plugin that requires zero coding or configuration.

It installs just like any other plugin and starts recording data right away. The interface is clean and simple, and it shows up right inside the regular WordPress admin.

Now that you know how to get this data for your site, let’s talk about where to find stats for your post categories.

How to view stats for category archives

The Pages report lists every page on your site that’s received a visit. While you can find traffic for your categories there, you can add a filter to clean up the report and see data only for your categories.

Start by clicking the Filter Pages button in the toolbar.

Next, select Page Type as the column and choose Category as the type of page you want to see stats for.

Once applied, the dashboard will update so that you only see stats for your categories. This allows you to see stats for each of your individual categories in the data table.

In this example, you can see that each of the three categories gets fairly similar traffic, but visitors browse the Gear Recommendations category the most.

Finding stats like this for your categories can help you understand which topics are most interesting to visitors, but let’s not stop here. Another way to uncover your most popular topics is to check the traffic of posts based on their category.

How to view stats for posts in a specific category

Using the filtering system again, you can select the Post Category column and choose any of your categories to analyze individually.

Rather than looking at stats for your category pages, this is going to show you stats for posts that are in the selected category.

This example reveals some really interesting data. While the Gear Recommendations category page itself got more views than the other category pages, the posts in this category received only 575 out of the 21,112 views the site got.

You can repeat this analysis for each of your categories to find which one gets the most visitors. In order to make a fair comparison, you might want to get the average number of views per post so that one category doesn’t appear more successful just because it has more posts.

You may find that a category you don’t often use gets a ton of visitors per post, and that could be the best topic to explore further on your site.

You can also use the Quick Stats at the top of the page to find out which category has the lowest bounce rate and highest average session duration.

Find your WP category stats today

While WordPress doesn’t include stats on its own, there are plenty of free tools available, like Independent Analytics.

If you want to give it a try, you can download it for free here:

You’ll be able to analyze your category traffic so you can find out which ones are most popular and what you should be writing about next.

Thanks for reading this tutorial on finding WordPress stats by category. If you have any comments or questions, you can post them below.