How to Analyze WordPress Traffic with GoAccess

Your UltraStack VPS has a powerful tool for analyzing your visitor information in a useful graphical tool called GoAccess. You can use it to view IP addresses of your visitors, analyze cache performance and more.

How to View the GoAccess Tool

1. Navigate to your production environment, and click the Tools icon at the top-right
   
2. Here, you’ll have options to view your Files, Database, or Access Logs
   

GoAccess Logs Features

A lot of information is available from GoAccess. Here, we’ll cover each of the tools in detail.

Settings and Preferences

Click on the cog icon at the top-left to adjust your display preferences and export the log files as a JSON file.

Overall Analyzed Requests

At the top of the screen, you’ll see a summary of all the requests in the log, including total requests, failed requests, unique visitors, files, and total data transferred for the time period.

Unique Visitors per Day

View the total number of unique visitors to your website based on IP address, Date, and User agent.

Visitor Hostnames and IP’s

View the IP addresses of your visitors and the number of requests they’ve made. You can use this information to determine if specific IP addresses are trying to abuse your website.

Cache Status of the Object Served

You can use this graph to get detailed information about the performance of your NGINX proxy cache, how many requests are Cache HIT and how many are Cache MISS.

Referring Sites

Learn where your traffic is coming from with the referring sites tool. Identify inbound links and search traffic.

And More Tools

• HTTP Status Codes. Learn if your site has errors, like 404’s, 500’s and redirects like 301’s and 302’s.
• Operating Systems. Learn how many of your users are visiting via Mobile OS’s or Windows, Mac, or Crawlers.
• Time Distribution. Learn what time of day your traffic is peaking, so you can plan for downtime or maintenance.
• Not Found URL’s (404’s). Learn which URL’s are being visited that don’t exist, so that you can add appropriate redirects.
• And many more!

Conclusion

GoAccess is a powerful tool for digging deep into your traffic statistics so that you can make intelligent decisions about your site, your marketing efforts, and plan for maintenance.