Disable or Hide WordPress.com Automatic Stats Plug-in Smiley Icon

WordPress.com Stats plugin for self-hosted WordPress blog (aka Automattic Stats plugin) is a good and free web visitors statistics tracker for WordPress blogging platform. The WordPress.com Status plugin provides the most popular metrics, stats and information that a blogger wants to track in a clear and concise interface.

However, after activating and implementing WordPress Stats plugin, a small smiley face icon will be displayed at the bottom of the page. The smiley face, although tiny in size, may affect the overall look and feel of the blog, or causing confusion among visitors about the image that appears oddly at the bottom.

Luckily, it’s possible to hide the smiley face added by the WordPress.com Automattic Stats plugin, by using the following CSS hack.

To hide the smiley face of WordPress.com Stats plugin, add the following CSS code to the WordPress blog’s stylesheet (style.css):

Code:

---

img#wpstats{width:0px;height:0px;overflow:hidden}

---

Alternatively, add the following JavaScript code into the WordPress footer.php after wp_footer() declaration:

HTML Code:

---

<script type=”text/javascript”>
var e = document.getElementById(”wpstats”);
e.style.width = “0px”;
e.style.height= “0px”;
e.style.overflow = “hidden”;
</script>

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Note that the image is required for proper stats gathering and traffic tracking. Anything such as applying “display:none” to the image will cause the image not to be loaded by the browser and will break the stats.

One consent of using the CSS or JavaScript above is the usage of hidden overflow style, which may be treated as a hidden text or hidden link by search engines especially Google that may gives penalty to such implementation that may be perceived as untrustworthy since it presents information to search engines differently than to visitors.