I use a number of analytics tools to see how little hits I get a month and one of the things that annoyed me is that my own visits as I’m writing posts or looking up older posts also get counted. There’s a silly trick to avoid this and it’s so easy it’s stupid I didn’t think of it before.
WordPress has these widgets in the Appearance menu which make it easy to put all sorts of components in your sidebar and footer. I also use the Text Widget to insert snippets of custom javascript code in my pages, things like those analytics tracker code for example.
To exclude yourself from those stats all you need to do is make sure that code doesn’t get included when you are browsing your own site. Here’s how it works.
- Put your web analytics script code in a sidebar text widget. Leave the title empty if you don’t want anything to show up.
- Click the “Visibility” button at the bottom of the widget panel.
- In the options, choose “Hide” if: “User” is “Logged in”.
- Save.
That’s all.
The cool thing is this works with any analytics tool (or any other custom javascript code you want to exclude yourself from) without having to figure out if it has any support for that itself.