The “WordPress.com Stats” plugin has been around for a while.  It provides a way of easily tracking the number of visitors to your site, who referred them to your site, what keywords they used to find your blog and what posts they read.

When you have a self-hosted blog (using the blogging platform by WordPress.org installed at your web host account) you must install this plugin, then activate it.  Activation of the plugin requires a code called an “API Key”.  The API Key is provided by WordPress.com.  This means you must have a WordPress.com account, the key is found under “Profile”.

It’s a bit like going home to mother to get the key to your front door.  Just like any relationship it can have it’s troubles.  Blogs and help forums are littered with entries by people who can’t get the plugin to work.  Recently I became one of them. While I have used the plugin successfully on several blogs (including this one), it simply refused to install on my newest blog on http://www.Wu-YiHealthTea.com

I got stuck in a loop – no matter how many times I entered the API Key the error message still said it was missing. Uninstalling, reinstalling, using different browsers, typing in the key, using cut & paste to enter the key – nothing worked.  I spent hours looking at help forums – WordPress.org support forums – and found lots of people with problems and few solutions. You reach a point where you just can’t go down that path any more. There has to be another way.

So what solution did I find? I searched for an alternative to the “WordPress.com Stats” plugin.  Eventually I found one.  It’s called PMetrics and has a free version or you can upgrade to several other versions depending on your needs.