One of the plugins I use on every WordPress site I have (ironically, with the exception of this one) is WP-UserOnline. I’m not sure why I haven’t installed it here on OpenSourceHack yet, but when the traffic numbers increase, this WP-UserOnline is definitely getting installed. I love being able to see live traffic on the site and this is the primary focus of this plugin. The only alternative I had before finding this Lester Chan plugin was to log in to my hosting control panel and view the raw logs. However, both options have their advantages as well as disadvantages.
When viewing the raw log files, I can view which bots have visited my site over a longer period of time. This helps me figure out which search engines are indexing my site regularly and which ones need a little more help finding it. This is actually how I figured out I was not being visited by Bing as I posted yesterday.
With the WP-UserOnline plugin, I can see the visitors and bots on my site NOW. Not only can you tell how many visitors you currently have live on your site, but you can view what page of your site each visitor is on and what referring page they came from. How cool is that? This is up to the minute analytics right there in front of you. This is a great way to tell which posts or pages are the most popular at that particular moment.
I’d recommend taking a peek over at Lester Chan’s site to check out his other plugins as well. Anything I’ve ever used from this site has been top notch and it’s obvious he takes pride in what he does. Go download his plugins now before he realizes they’re good enough to become premium plugins and starts charging for them.