Jetpack Stats: What It Tracks, Current Pricing and Its Limits

Jetpack Stats is the built-in analytics for WordPress from Automattic: it counts views and visitors and shows your top posts, referrers, countries, search terms and outbound clicks inside your WordPress dashboard. It is free for any site at any traffic level, with paid add-ons for UTM, device and city data. It is good at answering “what are people reading and where do they come from,” and it does not tell you which pages produce leads or sales.

This guide covers what the tool tracks, the current pricing (it changed again in 2026, so most forum threads are out of date), how to read the dashboard without getting confused by date ranges, why its numbers never match Google Analytics, how to fix missing or inflated stats, and when you need something else.

What Jetpack Stats Is

Jetpack Stats started as the stats screen of WordPress.com. Every WordPress.com site has it. Self-hosted WordPress sites get it in one of two ways:

• The full Jetpack plugin, which bundles Stats with backups, security, social sharing and other modules.
• The standalone Jetpack Stats plugin, released on WordPress.org in September 2026, which installs only the stats feature. Running both does not create duplicate menus.

Either way, the data does not live on your server. A small script loaded on each page sends a tracking request to WordPress.com, and the dashboard reads aggregated reports back from the WordPress.com API. That is why the plugin requires you to connect your site to a WordPress.com account: nothing is collected until the connection is complete.

What Jetpack Stats Tracks

A view is a page load or reload. A visitor is a browser seen for the first time in the selected period. One visitor can generate many views, so views are always the larger number.

What it does not track matters just as much:

• No time on page, scroll depth or bounce rate. Jetpack records visits and clicks, not behavior on the page.
• No goals, conversions, form submissions or revenue by page.
• No individual visitor data. You see “285 views,” never who viewed.
• No real time. Reports update periodically, with a short lag.

Is Jetpack Stats Free?

Yes, as of now. Jetpack’s Free or Paid Plan page states that Stats is available for free for any type of site and any amount of traffic, with full history. The free plan includes views and visitors, top posts and pages, referrers, clicks, search terms, authors, downloads, video plays, insights, subscribers and country locations. A paid plan adds only three cards: UTM stats, devices, and region and city locations.

Paid Stats is billed by monthly views. The tiered billing page lists tiers of up to 10k, 100k, 250k, 500k and 1M views, with an extra charge per million above that, and points to the logged-in purchase page for prices. Two rules worth knowing before you pick a tier:

• Spikes are forgiven. Views from your two highest-traffic days each month do not count toward the limit.
• Overage is enforced slowly. If a paid site exceeds its tier three months in a row, it must upgrade. Without an upgrade, the dashboard drops to 7-day highlights and 7-day charts, while data keeps being recorded in full.

Per the same billing page, Paid Stats is also included in the Jetpack Growth plan (up to 10k views a month) and Jetpack Complete (up to 100k). Bot traffic counts as views until it is filtered, which is how some sites in the old threads found themselves over a limit they had never reached with humans.

How to Set Up and View Jetpack Stats

1. In WP Admin, go to Plugins → Add New and install either Jetpack or Jetpack Stats.
2. Activate it and connect the site to a WordPress.com account when prompted. No data is collected before this step.
3. If you use the full Jetpack plugin, check that the Stats module is on under Jetpack → Settings → Traffic.
4. Open Stats in the WP Admin sidebar. The Traffic tab is the main report.

You can also open the same reports at wordpress.com/stats/day/your-domain, which is the documented workaround when the dashboard page in WP Admin will not load.

Settings worth changing on day one

• Count logged-in page views from: by default, views from administrators, editors, authors, contributors and logged-in subscribers are ignored. Leave staff roles off. Turn subscribers on if logged-in members are real readers on your site.
• Allow Jetpack Stats to be viewed by: only administrators see stats by default. Add editors or authors if your writers need their numbers.
• Exclude your office IP: the jetpack_stats_excluded_ips filter removes visits from specific IP addresses, useful for teams who browse the site while logged out.
• Honor Do Not Track: adding add_filter( 'jetpack_honor_dnt_header_for_stats', '__return_true' ); stops tracking visitors whose browsers send a DNT signal.

Reading the Dashboard Without Getting Confused

Most complaints about Jetpack Stats are really about which period a number belongs to. Three pieces show different windows:

• 7-day highlights at the top: visitors, views, likes and comments for the last seven days, compared with the seven days before.
• The chart: follows the date filter (today, last 7 or 30 days, month to date, last 12 months, year to date, last 3 years or a custom range). A separate dropdown groups bars by days, weeks, months or years. Grouping by weeks can draw a first bar that starts before your range, because weeks have fixed boundaries.
• The cards below (posts, referrers, countries and so on): in the current dashboard they follow the date filter too. In older versions they did not, which is what the long WordPress.com forum thread about date ranges was about.

Clicking a bar drills into that day, then into hours. The admin bar also shows a tiny 48-hour chart (the “sparkline”) when you view your site logged in. The bars are hours; the number beside them is the highest hourly value in that window, according to the long-standing WordPress.com explanation, not a daily total.

Two cards need care. Referrers will not add up to total views, because browsers often strip the referrer and a visit from a search engine or app then looks direct (see how referrers work). Search terms is mostly “Unknown search terms” because Google does not pass the query. For queries, use Google Search Console.

Why Jetpack Stats Never Matches Google Analytics

Running Jetpack and GA4 on the same site is allowed and common, and the numbers will differ. Jetpack’s troubleshooting guide lists the reasons, and each one pushes in a predictable direction:

The practical rule: pick one tool as the source of truth for each question, and compare trends, not totals. If the two move in the same direction week over week, your tracking is fine.

Fixing Missing, Wrong or Inflated Stats

You cannot reset stats or delete a day of bad data, so the fix for a bot spike is to filter going forward and read past periods with that spike in mind.

Exporting Data and the Stats API

For a spreadsheet, go to Stats → Traffic, click View details on a card, and use Download CSV. Do this per card and per period, since each export covers what the card shows.

For automation, the stats live on WordPress.com and are available through the WordPress.com REST API (the /rest/v1.1/sites/{site}/stats family of endpoints), authenticated with a token for the account that owns the connection. This is the route for pulling Jetpack numbers into a dashboard or a monthly report.

Privacy: What Jetpack Sends to WordPress.com

Each page view sends the page, the referrer, the visitor’s IP address, the user agent and your site ID to WordPress.com. The plugin also syncs a copy of your content, comments and user list so the reports can show titles and authors. Site owners never see identifying data. If you run a consent banner, treat Jetpack as a third-party analytics service and configure it the same way you configure any other tracker; that decision belongs to you and your legal adviser, not to the plugin’s marketing copy.

Jetpack Stats Cannot Tell You What a Page Is Worth

Jetpack ranks pages by views. Views are a reach number. A business site needs to know which pages bring enquiries, sign-ups or sales, and Jetpack has no concept of a conversion. Here is how far apart the two rankings can be.

• How-to post: 8 × $50 = $400 a month, or $100 per 1,000 views.
• Service page: 18 × $50 = $900 a month, or $750 per 1,000 views.

The page with less than a third of the views produces more than twice the value. A content plan built from the Jetpack top-posts card would invest in the wrong page. To get these numbers you need conversion events tied to the page where the visit started, plus a value for each conversion. Our guides on calculating conversion value and SEO conversion tracking walk through the setup.

This is the gap SEOConversion fills on WordPress: one script, autocaptured form submits, tel and mailto clicks and WooCommerce purchases, reported as conversions and dollar value by landing page for Google, Bing and AI assistants such as ChatGPT and Perplexity. It can run alongside Jetpack Stats, which keeps doing the readership side.

Jetpack Stats Alternatives

If you need more than Jetpack offers, choose by the question you want answered, not by feature count:

For a full comparison of WordPress options, see our WordPress analytics plugin guide. Store owners should also read WooCommerce analytics for order attribution.

When Jetpack Stats Is Enough

• Enough: personal blogs, newsletters and hobby sites that want to know which posts get read and where readers come from. The free plan covers this fully.
• Add the paid plan: you run tagged campaigns (newsletter, social, ads) and want to compare them inside WordPress, or you need city-level data for a local audience.
• Add another tool: the site exists to generate leads or sales. Keep Jetpack for content trends and add tracking that records conversions by landing page and channel.

Jetpack Stats FAQ