WordPress Plugin: Crawl Rate Tracker

Here at Branded3, we love WordPress. It is a brilliantly easy-to-use CMS, based on industry standards making it easy to develop for. It’s also very powerful, going beyond the ‘blog’ moniker that made it famous originally.

WordPress is used to power a very large variety of websites, including sites for: eBay, Yahoo!, Ford, Sony, Samsung and Mozilla Firefox – to name only a few. Whilst these big brands aren’t necessarily running their main websites on the platform, they do entrust it to power microsites and blogs that support their site.

One of the many advantages of WordPress is that it has a very large community of developers, who continually give back in the way of plugins and templates. In order to do our part, we’ve released a plugin to the masses via wordpress.org, called the Crawl Rate Tracker.

With the advent of Google Analytics and other JavaScript-based solutions; a lot of webmasters have lost the ability to easily analyse log files to see how search-engines are interacting with their site. With the Crawl Rate Tracker, you can chart all of the visits by Google and other major search-engines to your site for any time period you want – and also show crawl information for specific pages.

This is actually version 2 of this plugin, with the original being released back in 2008. We’ve completely re-written the plugin, and we’ve also added the ability to see the number of pages crawled per day, and the number of crawls. Also, by releasing this new version through WordPress.org, we can take advantage of pushing out updates automagically to people using the plugin.

If you have any feedback for us, please let us know by leaving a comment over on blogstorm.co.uk or on the official WordPress.org plugin page.

BY Douglas Radburn AT 8:53am ON Tuesday, 23 August 2011

Doug is our Senior Web Developer, and all round development expert. Having gained some informative insight and technical experience at two major digital agencies after graduating; Doug brought his knowledge and skills to Branded3 in 2009, and has been solving our development dilemmas ever since.