If you find Alexa rankings really important, you might want to consider displaying your rank directly on your website by adding an Alexa widget.
A higher Alexa ranking is lucrative for advertisers and webmasters to take your website seriously. So why not take that opportunity to show the ranking directly on your website?
Displaying the Alexa rank widget on your WordPress website is really easy. I will walk you through few different ways that you can add the widget to your website.
Follow this video guide to help you add the Alexa Rank Widget to your WordPress or Blogger blog.
If you are already familiar with Alexa and its ranking, you might want to skip the introductory section and find the code or plugins that you need for your website below.
For those who are still researching the topic, let’s start with some basic introduction on Alexa ranking and if you should really consider adding the widget.
What is Alexa Ranking – Alexa Traffic Rank?
Alexa ranking is a traffic rank position for a list of websites as published by Alexa. The website is owned by Amazon and presents itself as an information company that offers website information and analytics.
The company uses a sample of Internet users that it claims to be representative of all Internet users to estimate the ranks.
Alexa ranking, however, can be biased, and there are so many articles on the web claiming that the Alexa rankings aren’t perfect.
There’s certainly truth in such claims and you might want to understand how Alexa calculates rankings while taking them into consideration.
To solve problems around such issues, Alexa in recent years has introduced certified rankings to make the ranking more accurate. To have a certified rank webmasters, however, are required to subscribe to the costly Alexa plans.
You can visit the detailed article from Alexa to know how the traffic rankings are determined.
Now that you have some idea of what rankings can mean, let’s move on to how you can show the rankings on your blog or website by adding an Alexa widget.
Alexa Rank Widget – HTML code
Adding the Alexa rank widget is as simple as adding any text widget in WordPress. Alexa officially provides HTML code that you can add to your sidebar or any widget areas in your blog.
You can either display just your Alexa Rank or your Alexa rank including a count of the sites that link to your website.
Here’re the required HTML codes for both widgets.
1. Alexa Widget Showing Rank
Gist File:
https://gist.github.com/pradeepdotco/5c5019fa16f6edb79247
2. Alexa Widget showing Rank with Count of Site Links
https://gist.github.com/pradeepdotco/672222055674e75c696d
Obviously, you will need to change the WPism.com in the above code snippets to your website URL.
To add it to WordPress, you will simply need to add a Text Widget in the required place.
Instructions: Go to Appearance > Widgets and drag the Text Widget from available widgets to the location you want to display your Alexa Rank. Copy and paste the above code in the widget.
Detailed Instructions to Add Alexa Widget with Rank
- From your WordPress dashboard, go to Widgets under Appearance section.
- Click on the Arbitrary text or HTML widget and add it to your desired widgets section.
- Copy and paste the above code in the HTML widget.
- Change the URL in the above code to your own website URL.
- Click on Save and your Alexa Rank Widget should now appear on your Website.
Adding Alexa Widget with WordPress Plugins
That previous method of simply adding HTML codes should be the best option, but if you are looking to add the Alexa widget using plugins, there are few plugins that can help you with it.
I will cover one of the plugins that seem to be frequently updated and used by a number of people to add the Alexa widget.
Alexa Rank Widget WordPress Plugin
This simple widget just allows you to add the Alexa rank widget in your sidebar. All you have to do is drag the widget to the sidebar or footer you want to display and fill in your website URL.
The plugin provides two options to display the Alexa widget
- Square – Button (120 x 95)
- Vertical – Vertical Banner (120 x 240)
Instructions: Once you download and Install the plugin, go to Appearance > Widgets and Drag the Alexa Rank Widget from the available widgets.
Can the Alexa widget improve your ranking?
One important part of this article, before we conclude, is to answer if displaying the Alexa widget can improve your ranking.
I have seen several webmasters displaying their rankings on their blogs, but I don’t have a definite answer if it actually impacts the ranking. I have seen blogs with good ranks using the widget, and I might be biased to suggest from such pieces of evidence.
Alexa in one of its blog posts has mentioned that installing an Alexa widget to improve your rank is actually a myth and that the widget is not used to measure traffic.
One thing that I have learned from my experience is that it actually can influence your ranking if people are clicking on your widget and landing on your Alexa page, such as WPism.com page on Alexa.
Although it won’t make your ranking certified, Alexa can have more data to have some valid estimates for your ranking. Again, I would recommend going through how Alexa calculates its ranking in detail.
Why is my Alexa Rank decreasing?
I get questions about decreasing Alexa rank all the time. Alexa Rank is mostly based on your website traffic and if you see a drop in your Alexa ranking, it should also suggest that your website traffic has decreased recently. It might also mean that your competitors are gaining more traffic than you.
Few other situations why your Alexa rank could be dropping;
- Many of your website users are not using Alexa toolbar. Alexa uses data from its toolbar users and it might be possible that your website has a significant audience that aren’t using the Alexa toolbar.
- Other websites, mostly your competitors should have stepped up in traffic or getting more visitors with Alexa toolbar installed on their browsers.
- In few situations, your website might not have been favoured by recent changes in Alexa’s algorithm.
Final Thoughts on Alexa Ranking
It’s true that Alexa ranking cannot be taken as authoritative for website rankings and although it might help you to inform about website’s position broadly, it isn’t wise to use the data for website comparisons.
Displaying an Alexa rank widget on your website can be something for you to decide but as for my suggestion and provided that you have a good ranking, it can surely be a plus point for you to display the rank on your website.
As Google Page rank has been discontinued, we are only left with few public ranking options that are reliable. Alexa and Compete Traffic ranks might be the only options that we have today.
Do you use Alexa ranking widgets? I would love to hear your view about Alexa rankings in the comments below.
Alexa Widget Review Summary
It’s really easy to display the Alexa Ranking widget on your website using the custom code provided by Alexa or using the WordPress Plugins.
