To any of you working with Piwik:
Wondering how complex it is to set up Piwik up on the server, and what might be the potential difficulties and/or drawbacks.
Thanks in advance.
I’m pretty sure that @willwood has Piwik on his site Stacks4Stacks…
Thanks for your response, but I don’t see anything there. Paddle yes, Piwik no.
I use Piwik on all my websites, not just Stacks4Stacks.
So any advice, Will, on how best to set up the freebie version? Budget considerations unfortunately preclude the cloud.
The easiest method would be to install Piwik via Softaculous in your CPanel. Seriously, it takes no more than about 30 seconds and there is nothing at-all complicated to configure! It will do the database setup for you.
Once logged into Piwik, you can copy the embed code and paste it into RW Settings > Code > Body to include on each page. You certainly do not need any third-party stacks or addons to make Piwik work in a website.
A second benefit of installing it via Softaculous is that you’ll get email notification of any Piwik updates and your installation can be kept backed-up on a daily basis.
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Thanks so much for the feedback. I will investigate.
I succeeded in registering on the Softaculous website. That was the good news.
Beyond that, the instructions for purchasing the software are so byzantine, so arcane, so inscrutable, so totally incomprehensible, that I have no idea how to proceed.
Guess it’s back to the drawing board. Thanks, anyway, for your input.
I don’t understand what you are trying to buy? The standard version of Piwik is FREE and opensource. Like I say, normal setup is less than a minute and certainly DOES NOT involve purchasing anything. You must have taken a wrong turn somewhere or your hosting company is trying to sell you extra stuff.
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That’s a great tip, thanks @willwood! I long ago installed Piwik on my smaller sites (after reading your suggestion to do so), but I’ve been hesitant to install Piwik on some of my larger sites - sites that generate up to 1,000 unique visitors per day (so, 4-5k page views). However, I noticed that installing through Softaculous also creates a cronjob. With that in mind, do you know if this means that the installer is taking care of the issues that might slow more heavily-trafficed sites down?
Cheers,
Dave
@dave I would not consider 1,000 unique visitors a day to be a ‘heavy’ traffic load. Piwik should be able to cope perfectly fine. If a website was getting a million hits a month, I would start to look at Piwik performance more closely.
Yes there are Cron jobs you can run to tidy the database and Piwik is already optimised pretty well for speed and security.
You can also easily disable features like real-time tracking, if you are satisfied to just see basic analytics and you don’t care for things like animated globes that show who is on the website right now.
I also configure Piwik to delete any logs older than about 6 months:
https://piwik.org/faq/troubleshooting/faq_42/#faq_42
You will still preserve all the essential stats, you just won’t have precise details of visits older than 6 months.
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