There are hundreds of plugins and services which can provide statistics about your visitors. However skeltoac found that even though something like Google Analytics provides an incredible depth of information, it can be overwhelming and doesn’t really highlight what’s most interesting to me as a writer. That’s why Automattic created its own stats system, to focus on just the most popular metrics a blogger wants to track and provide them in a clear and concise interface.

Installing this WordPress.com Stats plugin is much like installing Akismet, all you need is to put in your API Key and the rest is automatic.

Once it’s running it’ll begin collecting information about your pageviews, which posts and pages are the most popular, where your traffic is coming from, and what people click on when they leave. It’ll also add a link to your dashboard which allows you to see all your stats on a single page. Less is more.

Finally, because all of the processing and collection runs on their servers and not yours, WordPress.com Stats plugin doesn’t cause any additional load on your hosting account. In fact, it’s one of the fastest stats system, hosted or not hosted, that you can use.

Pricing: Free
Requirements: WordPress 2.1+
Source: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/stats/