Since July 11, 2020, I have been using a WordPress plugin called Koko Analytics to keep track of New Leaf Journal page views. I use these statistics for our weekly newsletter, month-end reviews, and year-in-review articles. Now that we have just passed our five-year Koko Analytics anniversary, I thought it would be fun to take another look at the plugin and some stats from five years of Koko Analytics.

What is Koko Analytics?

I published two reviews of Koko Analytics. Five days after I started using it, I wrote about my very early impressions of Koko Analytics along with explaining why I chose it to replace Google Analytics. I published a more comprehensive review on January 13, 2022.

Koko Analytics is a free and open source WordPress plugin developed by Danny van Kooten’s ibericode which tracks page views and visitors. Unlike many popular analytics solutions such as Google Analytics, Koko Analytics does not involve any third parties. The small JavaScript code which tracks visits and all of the data is stored locally.

The current version of Koko Analytics allows webmasters to optionally decide whether to use cookies. Cookies allow Koko Analytics to more accurately track the number of distinct visitors. Webmasters can also enable a different method for tracking the number of visitors which involves “creat[ing] a one-way hash consisting of your visitor’s IP address, user agent and a daily rotating secret.” Alternatively, both cookie and cookieless tracking can be disabled and Koko Analytics will only track page views instead of distinct visitors (I opt for the third option). Koko Analytics explains how this works in its docs.

Koko Analytics has seen improvements since I reviewed it in 2022, but the basic functionality remains the same. I previously wrote briefly about how it started keeping track of homepage visits (a welcome improvement). The most significant changes are the addition of the cookieless tracking option (which I do not use, opting to take a more minimal approach and not worry about distinguishing visitors from page views) and no longer respecting “do not track” settings (Koko Analytics does not track hits from browsers which disable JavaScript, however). It is also possible to make the Analytics page public, but I have not done so (I have no current plans to but I may do so in the future).

The most significant Koko Analytics change is that there is now a premium version with additional features. I am sticking with the free version since it serves me well, but the premium version may make Koko Analytics more practical for websites which need more detailed analytics than I do but are interested in a privacy-friendly solution.

Why Do I Use Koko Analytics?

I did not know much about running a website when I launched The New Leaf Journal in April 2020. Although I was not a fan of Google, I defaulted to using Google Analytics when we first launched and also tried Clicky. To be sure, there was not much to track – we did not gain a search engine foothold until about November 2020 and our visitor totals were very small until the the first quarter of 2021.

While I did not have as clear an idea of how I wanted to run The New Leaf Journal as a privacy-friendly website in its first few weeks online (note that I only switched from Windows to Linux for my own computer use in August 2020), I knew enough that I did not like the idea of having Google trackers on site. I searched the WordPress plugin directory for an alternative and, as I explained in my first impressions article in July 2020, opted for Koko Analytics over Statify (Statify may be a good option, but I ultimately never tried it). I appreciated that it ran entirely locally and had little-to-no effect on website performance (we were still on a cheap shared hosting plan back then).

Koko Analytics has consistently worked well for me and, as I noted in my 2022 review, my comparison of Koko Analytics referrer stats to our Google Search Console insights (note Google Search Console stats track page domain hits from Google Search) led me to believe that Koko Analytics is reasonably accurate. I have not had many issues with it. There was one occasion where Koko Analytics was double-counting after an update, but the developers pushed a fix within hours and published information on how to retroactively fix the affected statistics. There have been a couple occasions in 2025 where I suspect that AI crawlers were incorrectly counted as visitors, but I have not seen that issue reoccur since early June.

Based on my five years of having used Koko Analytics on The New Leaf Journal, it continues to have my strong recommendation for WordPress webmasters who want a good idea of how many visits their websites and individual articles receive, with additional options to try to track distinct visitors. It is performant, light weight, and broadly privacy-friendly, especially when compared to popular third-party solutions. Webmasters who need more detailed information than what the free version of Koko Analytics offers may see if the paid premium version is amenable to their use case.

60 Most-Visited New Leaf Journal Articles in 60 Months of Koko Analytics

I often publish information about our most-visited articles for one-week, one-month, three-month, and one-year periods. But today we are going to go big. July 11, 2025, marked the five-year anniversary of my having implemented Koko Analytics on The New Leaf Journal. Five years is 60 months. Below, I present the 60 most-visited articles from July 11, 2020 through July 11, 2025, according to Koko Analytics. (My year-end 2020 article combined Koko Analytics stats with just over two months of Google Analytics stats.)

  1. Review of /e/ – An Android Alternative For Mobile Phones (N.A. Ferrell. November 21, 2021.)
  2. The Mystery of Sōseki and Tsuki ga Kirei (N.A. Ferrell. March 14, 2021.)
  3. RSS as a Facebook Alternative (N.A. Ferrell. February 21, 2021.)
  4. Recommended F-Droid FOSS Apps For Android-Based Devices (2021) (N.A. Ferrell. November 28, 2021.)
  5. Cycling Doping Fallacies (N.A. Ferrell. January 5, 2024.)
  6. Installing Ubuntu Touch on a Google Nexus 7 (2013) (N.A. Ferrell. July 5, 2021.)
  7. Man Uploads 2,000,000 YouTube Videos (N.A. Ferrell. May 8, 2022.)
  8. The Pokémon Special Split in Generation 2 – Statistics and Analysis (N.A. Ferrell. January 18, 2022.)
  9. An In-Depth Look at Norton Safe Search (N.A. Ferrell. October 18, 2022.)
  10. Persona 4 Golden Digital Artbook Review (Steam) (N.A. Ferrell. November 15, 2020.)
  11. The Last Stand of Constantine XI (N.A. Ferrell. May 30, 2020.)
  12. An Early Review of Pixelfed – Instagram Alternative (N.A. Ferrell. November 13, 2020.)
  13. Peekier Search Engine Review (N.A. Ferrell. February 26, 2022.)
  14. Tiki paralogue trick in Fire Emblem Engage (N.A. Ferrell. February 3, 2023.)
  15. How to Find Substack RSS Feeds and Other Notes (N.A. Ferrell. June 19, 2021.)
  16. Installing LineageOS on a 2013 Nexus 7 (Wi-Fi) (N.A. Ferrell. July 28, 2021.)
  17. How the Forget-Me-Not Flower Found Its Name (N.A. Ferrell. March 11, 2021.)
  18. The Nice Boat: A Look Back at the School Days Anime (N.A. Ferrell. May 6, 2021.)
  19. Reviewing the HALOmask and är Mask (Victor V. Gurbo. December 2, 2020.)
  20. Ghostwriter Markdown Editor Review (N.A. Ferrell. October 7, 2021.)
  21. Examining Whether Defense Wins NBA Championships (N.A. Ferrell. July 9, 2024.)
  22. Review of the Teracube 2e Smartphone (N.A. Ferrell. November 19, 2021.)
  23. Height differences in anime romances (N.A. Ferrell. March 22, 2023.)
  24. Lukol Search Engine Shows Up in Logs (N.A. Ferrell. March 28, 2022.)
  25. Broken Optical Audio Cable Door “Fix” (N.A. Ferrell. September 16, 2023.)
  26. Planning and Angel Next Door Season 2 (N.A. Ferrell. November 5, 2023.)
  27. Performing Site-Specific Searches With DuckDuckGo (N.A. Ferrell. August 8, 2021.)
  28. Stop Saying Bob Dylan Can’t Sing (Victor V. Gurbo. July 23, 2021.)
  29. The Story of Billy Possum, President Hoover’s Pet Opossum (N.A. Ferrell. November 30, 2021.)
  30. Installing GrapheneOS on a Google Pixel 6a (N.A. Ferrell. May 15, 2023.)
  31. Heights in “The Dangers in My Heart” Anime (N.A. Ferrell. April 2, 2023.)
  32. A 2021 List of Alternative Search Engines and Search Resources (N.A. Ferrell. June 13, 2021.)
  33. A Look at ProxiTok, a TikTok Frontend (N.A. Ferrell. May 14, 2022.)
  34. A Follow-Up Post on the Meaning of “Blob Dylan” (N.A. Ferrell. April 12, 2021.)
  35. Cross-posting from Mastodon to Twitter (N.A. Ferrell. April 18, 2022.)
  36. Biden, Lincoln, and Counting Back From the President’s Birth (N.A. Ferrell. April 29, 2022.)
  37. The Angel Next Door Spoils Me Rotten – Anime Review (N.A. Ferrell. March 30, 2023.)
  38. Yuki’s Hair Color in A Sign of Affection (N.A. Ferrell. February 2, 2024.)
  39. Using an Amiga OS-Inspired Window Theme In XFCE With XFWM4 (N.A. Ferrell. January 2, 2022.)
  40. Understanding Hair Color in the Kimi ni Todoke Anime Series (N.A. Ferrell. August 19, 2021.)
  41. Kaori After Story – Visual Novel Review (N.A. Ferrell. December 31, 2022.)
  42. Expert Gamer’s 1999 Yoshi in Pokémon April Fools Prank (N.A. Ferrell. April 1, 2021.)
  43. Dragonair Safari in Pokémon Yellow (N.A. Ferrell. October 5, 2023.)
  44. Usagi Drop: A Complicated Anime Pick (N.A. Ferrell. January 19, 2021.)
  45. Reviewing FrogFind: A Search Engine For Vintage Computers (N.A. Ferrell. July 24, 2022.)
  46. Hair Color in Raven of the Inner Palace (N.A. Ferrell. November 15, 2023.)
  47. Abraham Lincoln’s 1851 Letters on Work to John D. Johnston (N.A. Ferrell. November 4, 2021.)
  48. The Last Nintendo Wii Games (N.A. Ferrell. August 1, 2023.)
  49. Sending SMS Messages From My Computer With XMPP Through JMP (N.A. Ferrell. September 8, 2021.)
  50. A Sign of Affection – Anime Review (N.A. Ferrell. March 28, 2024.)
  51. Itsuomi’s Hair Color in A Sign of Affection (N.A. Ferrell. February 5, 2024.)
  52. What is Becovi Search? (N.A. Ferrell. July 10, 2022.)
  53. Calvin Coolidge Describes His Mother, Victoria (N.A. Ferrell. March 13, 2021.)
  54. “Casey’s Revenge” – Grantland Rice’s 1896 Reply Poem to “Casey at Bat” (N.A. Ferrell. August 26, 2021.)
  55. Futaba Igarashi’s Hair Is Naturally Green? (N.A. Ferrell. November 23, 2021.)
  56. Using Web Archives To Get Around CAPTCHAs (N.A. Ferrell. August 12, 2022.)
  57. “Uncle Susan is a Wolf” – A Graffiti Photo and Research Project (N.A. Ferrell. December 29, 2021.)
  58. Kaga no Chiyo Autumn Haiku on Unrequited Love (N.A. Ferrell. December 14, 2020.)
  59. Japanese Environment in PoL, Lutris, and Bottles (N.A. Ferrell. June 16, 2022.)
  60. Building an Airline Res-O-Glas Guitar Copy (Victor V. Gurbo. August 26, 2020.)

Much of our all-time top 60 ranking is dominated by articles from 2021, which should come as little surprise. Even the articles that are past their visitor attracting peaks continue to gain views, keeping them ahead of articles which may be stronger now but have not had as much time to gather views. Four of our top seven positions (1st, 3rd, 5th, and 7th) are occupied by articles which gained most of their views from having hit page one of Hacker News, but with a few exceptionsmost articles on the list owe their positions primarily to ordinary search engine and visitor traffic. The list also shows the wide range of topics that I (and in three cases, Victor V. Gurbo) have written about. Our top-10 alone covers tech, Japanese literary legends, doping in sports, and video games. For those of you who may be interested in running a comparison, I last put together an all-time list going 36 articles deep for The New Leaf Journal’s third birthday on April 27, 2023.

Conclusion

The only plugins that I have been using for at least as long as Koko Analytics are WP Super Cache, UpdraftPlus, and Jeff Starr’s BBQ (I upgraded to BBQ Pro either shortly before or after setting up Koko Analytics) . Because I often share notes from our Koko Analytics stats with readers, I figured that the anniversary was worth memorializing in an article. While changes and improvements are always possible, I expect to continue using Koko Analytics on The New Leaf Journal for the foreseeable future.

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