You can't improve what you don't measure

I hope you've been busy this week setting your website goals for 2010. It all starts with measuring your site's performance and I have previously mentioned Google Analytics which is fantastic. But some people prefer to have all the information right within their Joomla site, so let's take a look at how to achieve this using a free extension.

1. The extension is called JoomlaStats and the latest version at time of writing is 3.0.1. This is currently in "Alpha" which means it is very new and not recommended for production sites as unknown bugs may damage your site. It is therefore safest to go with a previous version. Depending on which version you choose, you may have to enable the Joomla legacy plugin under Plugin Manager. Regardless of which version you choose, you should always make a backup of your site before installing extensions and know how to restore your site if things go wrong.

2. Go to the download page and scroll to the bottom. Choose one of the files that starts with com (e.g. com_joomlastats_v2.3.1.zip). Click the filename to download it to your computer.

3. There are several modules that can be used with the extension but the only one you need to get it working is mod_jstats_activate. This is also on the download page, just above the components option. If in the previous step you downloaded a version 2 component, you will need to download mod_jstats_activate_v2.0.0.zip. If you downloaded the version 3 component, download mod_jstats_activate_v3.0.0.zip.

4. Login to your Joomla Administrator and install both the component and module. Installing extensions is demonstrated in lesson 12 of our free Joomla video tutorial.

5. Go to Module Manager and enable JoomlaStats Activation.

6. Go to Components - JoomlaStats. You can now see various statistics for your site.

This solution is not for everybody. Statistics can take up a lot of database space and slow down your site's performance. Give it a go but if you run into trouble, you can always use Google Analytics or the statistics software provided by your web host.