It can sometimes be frustrating when you realize you don’t have enough access to data to troubleshoot issues on your WordPress site. Thankfully, with the new revamped MyKinsta Analytics you can now investigate and diagnose a lot of these problems from right within the dashboard. Today we’ll dive into each section of MyKinsta Analytics and share some examples (and real-world scenarios) of how you can take advantage of these new reports to improve and fix your WordPress sites. Find out what’s going on under the hood!
MyKinsta analytics
The main dashboard of MyKinsta has a few quick insights into your resource usage, as well as data transfer and unique visits. To dive into the more in-depth reports you will want to click on “Analytics” on the sidebar.
Access MyKinsta Analytics
At the top you can filter the stats individually or view data for all of them combined. You can then choose to see data for the past 24 hours, 7 days, or 30 days.
Filter analytics
MyKinsta Analytics has been split up into six different sections of which we will dive into each further below:
Under the resource usage section, you can view your total number of visitors, bandwidth usage, total requests by bytes, and total requests by visits.
The visitor’s report lets you see the total number of people that have visited your WordPress site. If you highlight a specific point in time on the graph it will show you some comparison statistics, such as the total number of visitors being higher than the previous day, etc. This is the exact number of visitors to the web server. Remember, that your Google Analytics filters and rules won’t work here. In case you’d like to know the number of human visitors of your site, all services will show a different number based on their own set of rules — who they consider to be irrelevant/bot traffic and those that they don’t.
Resources – Visitors
Kinsta’s hosting plans are based on the total number of visitors to your site. Read more about how Kinsta counts visitors. Note: Your total visits count in the resources section might differ from the total you see on your main MyKinsta dashboard. This is because the MyKinsta dashboard shows visits within your current billing cycle.
The bandwidth usage report shows the total data your site has used. Kinsta charges for plans based on the number of visitors to your site, but bandwidth usage can help you troubleshoot performance issues. If you highlight a specific point in time on the graph it will show you some comparison statistics, such as the total being lower than the period average, etc.
Resources – bandwidth usage
We strongly recommend every customer to implement a CDN. Not only because you’ll see an increase in speed, but this can be a great way to decrease bandwidth and resources on your site. CDN bandwidth is very cheap or even free. Check out our in-depth post on the benefits of a WordPress CDN and why you should use one. Or if you’re ready, check out how to enable the Kinsta CDN on your site.
A byte is a sequence of binary bits in a serialized data stream in data transmission systems. When it comes to your WordPress site, this is typically measured in MBs, GBs, and TBs. The total number of bytes transferred on your site make up your bandwidth. In the top requests by bytes report, you can see exactly which requests on your site are using up the most bandwidth.
Resources – top requests by bytes
The top requests by count report shows you the most requested resources from your site on the server. Using this report and the ones above can help you troubleshoot and figure out where your bandwidth is going. A lot of times you can easily spot a pattern.
Resources – top requests by count
Under the dispersion section, you can view different insights about traffic on your site.
The mobile vs desktop report allows you to see which devices are hitting your site. In this example below, you can see that it is primarily desktop traffic at over 86%.
Dispersion – mobile vs desktop
Under the performance monitoring section, you can view your average PHP + MySQL response time, PHP throughput, AJAX usage, top average upstream time, and top maximum upstream time.
Whenever you visit your WordPress site, PHP and MySQL are used to compile and query the data you see on the page. This chart shows you the average response time of the PHP engine and the MySQL engine for every non-cached dynamic request. Knowing these response times can help you troubleshoot slowness. If you are seeing huge spikes here, feel free to open up a support ticket with our team.
Performance – Average PHP + MySQL Response Time
Throughput indicates the number of transactions per second an application can handle, and in this report, it is referring to PHP throughput from your WordPress site. In other words, it shows you how many times a PHP asset was requested.
Performance – PHP throughput
AJAX is a client-side script that communicates to and from a server/database without the need for a postback or a complete page refresh. When it comes to WordPress, a lot of you have probably seen this in your speed tests. The top two issues with AJAX include plugins causing it to spike and CPU issues on the back-end. Make sure to check out our in-depth post on diagnosing high Admin-AJAX usage on your WordPress site.
Admin-AJAX usage
The AJAX usage report in MyKinsta analytics can be a great way to help you troubleshoot these types of issues as you can see if you are seeing certain AJAX spikes during certain periods. This chart shows the count of the admin-ajax requests. You can then utilize some of the tips in the post we mentioned above to narrow down where they might be coming from.
Performance – AJAX usage
Upstream time is the total time taken for NGINX (and upstream servers) to process a request and send a response. Time is measured in seconds, with millisecond resolution. Read more about NGINX metrics. This list shows the top average PHP and MySQL response times (combined) for your requests.
Performance – Top average upstream time
This list shows the top response times from PHP and MySQL. Please note, that these numbers can be one time peaks, it’s suggested to compare this list with “Top Average Upstream Time.”
Performance – top maximum upstream time
Under the response analysis section, you can view your response code breakdown, response stats, 500 error breakdown, 400 error breakdown, redirect breakdown, and top 404 errors.
The response code breakdown report lets you see an overview of the distribution of HTTP status codes served for the requested resources. Response codes, also known as HTTP status codes, are not always bad. For example, a 200 HTTP status code means that “Everything is OK.” This is the code that is delivered when a web page or resource acts exactly the way it’s expected to. We’ll go into the others further below.
Response – response code breakdown
The response stats report lets you see the total number of redirects happening, errors, success rate, and error ratio. Every WordPress site will typically have a small error rate ratio, this is completely normal.
Response – response stats
The 500 error breakdown report shows you the total number of 500 errors that occurred on the server. Here is a more in-depth explanation of what each of these means:
Response – 500 error breakdown
The 400 error breakdown report shows you the total number of 400 errors that occurred on the server. Here is a more in-depth explanation of what each of these means:
Response – 400 error breakdown
The 300 error breakdown report shows you the total number of 300 errors that occurred on the server. Remember, that like 200 response codes, not all errors are bad. 300 errors typically mean you have simply moved the content elsewhere. 301 redirects, for example, are very important as they will help retain your SEO rankings for URL and site changes. Here is a more in-depth explanation of what each of these means.
Response – redirect breakdown
The top 404 errors report helps you more easily troubleshoot the most requested resources that visitors or bots are hitting that no longer exist on your site.
Top 404 errors
If you’re seeing a large amount of 404 errors, it is recommended that you go through your site and fix them for SEO and usability purposes. You can also look them up in Google Search Console under crawl errors.
Fix 404 errors
Under the cache analysis section, you can view your cache component stack, total cache bypasses, and cache component chart.
Whenever a file or resource is requested from Kinsta’s servers it sends a value in the HTTP response header (X-Kinsta-Cache) to let you know the status of the cache.
HTTP response header
There are four types of cache response headers returned:
The cache component stack report lets you see the total number of response header values that have been generated from your site.
Cache – cache component stack
The cache component chart is again another way to view your total cache requests.
Cache – cache component chart
The top cache bypasses report lets you see some of the top requests that are bypassing the cache on Kinsta’s servers. It is good to take a look at this and ensure they should be. In this example below, we can see that the OneSignal push notification plugin has a few files that are bypassing the cache. Because of how the plugin works, this is actually OK. We can also see that /wp-cron.php isn’t cached, which again, shouldn’t be.
Cache – top cache bypasses
Under the Geo analysis section, you can view your top countries, top regions, top cities, and the top IP address visiting your site.
The top countries report can be one good way to determine where you should be placing your WordPress site. This is a geo analysis by country of the requests from visitors IP addresses. In this example below, the site should probably be placed on a server in the United States, since a majority of the traffic is from there. Make sure to read our in-depth post about network latency and why it’s important to strategically place your site. Kinsta now has 15 Google Cloud Platform locations around the globe where you can host your WordPress site.
Geo & IP – top countries
Geo analysis by region of the requests from visitors IP addresses.
Geo & IP – top regions
Geo analysis by city of the requests from visitors IP addresses.
Geo & IP – top cities
The top client IPs report can be very helpful if your site is suddenly generating a lot of bandwidth or getting hit by bots. This shows the top IP addresses, listed by request count.
Geo & IP – top client IPs
How can you use this data? Well, we recently did a case study on a small e-commerce WordPress site. Analyzing the top 10 client IPS for the last 7 days to the site instantly showed some suspicious activity. A majority of them had over 10,000 requests, and there were quite a few. It was most likely a DDoS or brute force attack. You can always rely on Google to provide you with data. Entering in a couple of the top IPs into search, we could easily see that most of them were all proxy addresses, meaning someone was most likely wanting to hide their traffic.
The next step in this scenario that we would recommend is either reaching out to the Kinsta team to block the IPs for you, or considering a web application firewall like Cloudflare or Sucuri. You can check out our case study in which Sucuri instantly blocked all this bad traffic.
Full log data in regards to analytics is retained for 30 days. We suggest checking the dashboard and analytics section more frequently after first migrating to Kinsta. If you see an unexplained traffic spike or inconsistency which has you concerned, let our team know and we can further investigate the logs for you to help determine the cause.
With all of the data above, hopefully, now you have a better understanding of how Kinsta is actually delivering content to your visitors.
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