WordPress is popular with businesses because it is easy to run and extend: you can add a coming soon page in an afternoon, hand routine updates to a maintenance service, and choose from thousands of plugins for whatever the site needs next. One of the first things it needs is analytics.
Whether you run an online store, a company site or a blog, you want to know how many people visit, where they come from, what they read and what they do next. Google Analytics is the most widely used tool for that, and its current version is Google Analytics 4 (GA4). Universal Analytics stopped collecting data in July 2023, so any plugin or tutorial still talking about UA tracking IDs is out of date.
Strictly, you do not need a plugin: you can paste the GA4 tag into your theme’s header-scripts field, as our step-by-step guide to adding Google Analytics to WordPress shows. A plugin adds convenience: guided setup, reports inside the dashboard, event tracking without code and consent handling. Here are the five worth considering in 2026.
Last updated: 2026. Tested with WordPress 6.8.
1. MonsterInsights
MonsterInsights is the most installed third-party Google Analytics plugin for WordPress. Its setup wizard authenticates with your Google account, creates or selects the GA4 property and inserts the tag, so you never touch code. Reports then appear under Insights in the dashboard: overview, top posts and pages, traffic sources, countries, devices and, with Search Console connected, the queries that bring visitors.
The free version covers the basics. Paid tiers add e-commerce tracking for WooCommerce and Easy Digital Downloads, form-conversion tracking, affiliate-link and outbound-click reports, scroll depth, author and category dimensions, and a Consent Mode integration for cookie banners. It is a good fit for site owners who want to read analytics in WordPress rather than in GA4, and for stores that need purchase tracking without configuring Google Tag Manager. The trade-off is that the dashboard reports and upsell notices add weight to the admin, though not to the public site.
2. ExactMetrics
ExactMetrics began life as Google Analytics Dashboard for WP (GADWP), a long-running free plugin, and is now owned by the same company as MonsterInsights. The two products share most of their code, so the feature list is similar: a setup wizard, GA4 support, dashboard reports, event tracking for outbound links, downloads and forms, and e-commerce tracking in the paid version.
Differences are mainly in interface and pricing tiers. If you compare the two, look at which reports are included at the level you would pay for rather than at the marketing pages. Note that GA4 no longer reports classic bounce rate by default; both plugins show engagement rate and average engagement time instead, which measure whether a visitor stayed longer than ten seconds, viewed a second page or triggered a conversion.
3. Google Site Kit
Site Kit by Google is the official plugin and, for most sites, the one to install first. It connects Google Analytics 4, Search Console, PageSpeed Insights, AdSense and Tag Manager in one authorisation flow, verifies site ownership automatically and inserts the GA4 tag for you.
The dashboard shows a combined view: traffic and top pages from GA4, search queries and clicks from Search Console, Core Web Vitals scores from PageSpeed Insights and earnings from AdSense, plus per-post stats in the editor’s admin bar. Site Kit is completely free with no upsells, is maintained by Google and supports Consent Mode. What it does not do is deep custom event tracking or e-commerce reports; for those you either use GA4’s own interface or add one of the plugins above. For a blog or business site that mainly wants to know what is being read and how it was found, Site Kit is usually enough.
4. Analytify
Analytify takes a design-first approach to the same task. After authentication it adds the GA4 tag across the site and presents reports in a clean, visual dashboard that is easy for non-technical users to read. Per-post and per-page statistics appear directly in the post list and editor, which content teams tend to like.
Premium add-ons cover WooCommerce and Easy Digital Downloads tracking, campaign (UTM) reports, goal tracking, email summaries and front-end reports that you can display to clients or site members with a shortcode. That last feature is its distinctive one: if you build sites for clients and want them to see their own traffic without logging into Google, Analytify handles it.
5. WP Statistics
WP Statistics is different from the others: it is not a Google Analytics connector but a self-hosted analytics system that stores visitor data in your own WordPress database. It records visits, referrers, search engines, countries, browsers and top pages, and shows them in graphs and maps in the dashboard. The Pro version adds custom post type reports, real-time stats and advanced widgets.
Its appeal is privacy: no data leaves your server, IP addresses can be anonymised or hashed, and it can run without cookies, which simplifies GDPR compliance and lets it count visitors who block Google’s script. The downsides are that data lives in your database (plan for growth on a busy site), that it does not tie into Search Console or Google Ads, and that its numbers will not match GA4’s. Many sites run it alongside GA4 as a second opinion; some privacy-focused sites use it instead.
Choosing and setting up correctly
Install exactly one plugin that inserts the GA4 tag. Running Site Kit and MonsterInsights together, or a plugin plus a hand-pasted snippet, double-counts every pageview. If you have EU or UK visitors, connect a consent banner (Complianz, CookieYes or your plugin’s built-in Consent Mode) so tracking respects the visitor’s choice. After setup, open Reports > Realtime in GA4 and load your site in a private window to confirm data is arriving, then give standard reports a day or two to populate.
Which Canyon theme fits
All Canyon themes include a header-scripts field in the Customizer, so you can also add GA4 without any plugin. For content sites where engagement reports matter most, Bloge keeps post templates clean for accurate scroll and read tracking; magazine publishers with many categories can look at News One.
Summary
Site Kit is the free default and covers most sites. Choose MonsterInsights, ExactMetrics or Analytify when you want e-commerce, form or affiliate tracking with reports inside WordPress, and add WP Statistics if you want a privacy-friendly count that does not depend on Google. Whichever you choose, the goal is the same: knowing what visitors do so you can decide what to publish and improve next.
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