Upgrading to SmarterStats 8.x & The Benefits You’ll See

We will be scheduling an upgrade to the latest version of SmarterStats 8.x during the week of March 24th, so all of our shared hosting customers using this service will receive the following benefits:

Tremendous Performance Increases

SmarterTools spent a great deal of time benchmarking SmarterStats and then making changes to increase the level of performance across the board. In many instances they’ve seen increases of 70% or more in the speed and responsiveness of the SmarterStats interface. We’ve also seen huge decreases in memory and CPU usage, not to mention much faster importing of log files, even under extremely heavy loads. All of this means that the product runs much quicker and much more efficiently than previous versions. Some of the changes they’ve made include:

• Re-factored and completely re-wrote many areas of the web interface to reduce the amount of JavaScript code, CSS and HTML, making the entire web interface much faster, much more responsive and much lighter weight.
• CSS files have been converted to LESS, making stylesheets much smaller and more efficient.
• The button bars were re-factored to be lighter weight controls.
• The context menus were re-factored to be lighter weight controls.
• The date pickers were re-factored to be lighter weight controls.
• The tree view controls were re-factored to be lighter weight controls.
• Greatly increased the performance of the Web interface.

Greater Support for International Customers

SmarterStats is a truly international product. With customers in well over 120 different countries, support for languages other than English is a priority. In addition, as SmarterStats’ adoption across the globe continues to rise, support for non-Western character sets is also essential. With SmarterStats they’ve not only included support for right-to-left languages in the management interface and on the portal, but they’ve also gone through the entire product and greatly simplified our language strings to make things much easier for automated translations and for customers who create their own translations files.

Site Tuning Functionality

The new site tuning functionality in SmarterStats scans your site for more than 20 different problems known to affect a site’s search engine ranking, such as broken links, excessive linking, META and title tags, and multiple redirects.

Interface Enhancements for Mobile Devices

SmarterStats improves the user experience when accessing the web interface from any tablet computer or smartphone. Page speed is significantly increased and all features of SmarterStats are fully compatible with touch screens so users can view stats from anywhere on an Apple, Android or Windows mobile device.

Improved International and Foreign Language Support

In addition to providing analytics for international search engines, SmarterStats adds support for URLs with foreign characters, such as those in Russian or Chinese. In addition, users can now email reports in the recipient’s preferred language, making it easier to share crucial site and SEO analytics across any language.

Support for .ZIP and .GZ files

Individuals and companies that compress their raw logs as .ZIP and .GZ files can now import them in to SmarterStats at any time, allowing companies to significantly reduce the amount of space needed to store log files.

New Report Items

This adds several new report items, including a bounce rate report that identifies how frequently visitors land on your site and immediately leave without viewing additional pages and a report that identifies the most popular entry and exit pages of your website.

Better Browser Detection

SmarterStats has reworked its user agent detection to provide users with a clearer understanding of the browsers, devices or operating systems visitors are using to surf your website.

Page Details View

This introduces the page details view, which allows users and site administrators to view performance and traffic stats, as well as page tuning details, on a page-by-page basis. Plus, users can create page aliases directly from the page details view, making it easy to add common names to unique page URLs whenever necessary.

Improved Bot Detection

To help users better understand activity from real visitors, programmatic calls to your website (such as those from a REST API or Web services) and calls from site uptime services are now considered a spider/bot and will be included in the statistics for those reports.