Rick Hellewell

<p>Google Analytics (GA) allows you to see what your visitors are doing on your site. The common installation is to run some JavaScript code in the client’s browser that reports back to GA. The problem with that is many ad-blockers will block that client-side (browser) action, resulting in incomplete GA data.</p>
<p>The Server Side Analytics plugin does all the work on your server. So GA is used on all site visits – even visitors using ad blocking. That gives you more accurate GA data.</p>
<p>Your site visitor’s IP address is anonymized (the last ‘octet’ is removed), so only the visitor’s city is known. The plugin only uses the client-side WordPress session ID, so complies with basic GDPR privacy, as long as your site has an acknowledged cookie policy. There is nothing additionally stored on the client side, so visitor privacy for this plugin and the generated analytics is assured.</p>
<p>All you need is a GA account – start here: https://www.google.com/analytics/ . Note that you will need to set up a “UA” type account. Help starts here: https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/9306384?hl=en   Make sure you set up a “Universal Analytics” account – which will result in a UA-xxxxxxx-1 value to use in the plugin.</p>
<p>If you use Google Analytics, then you should be aware of their privacy policy, which could apply to your use of GA; see it here https://www.google.com/analytics/terms/us.html . You may also need a cookie policy and acknowledgement displayed on your site.</p>
<p>We suggest that you consult with your legal advisor for specific methods and messages needed for GDPR compliance on your site. We provide no warranty or guarantee of GDPR compliance. We are not providing any legal advice. We are not responsible in any way for your use of our suggested GDPR solution. Your mileage may vary. Objects in mirror are closer than you expect. All aspirin is alike. Professional driver on a closed course.  Your mileage may vary.</p>
<h3>Privacy</h3>
<p>This plugin does not save any personal information on your server. It will store cookies on your visitor’s browsers. If you have enabled Google Analytics, it will also store a randomly-generated ID value as a cookie; there is no personal information associated with that cookie. The plugin does not share information with others.</p>


CellarWeb Server Side Analytics

Allows using Google Analytics via server-side request. Many ad blockers block client-side Google Analytics, resulting in incomplete values.

Mehul Gohil

Ankur Modi

Daan van den Bergh

Plausible Insights OÜ

<p>Plausible Analytics is an easy-to-use, open source, lightweight and privacy-friendly web analytics alternative to Google Analytics.</p>
<p>Plausible Analytics doesn’t use cookies and is fully compliant with GDPR, CCPA and PECR. Made and hosted in the EU, powered by European-owned cloud infrastructure 🇪🇺.</p>
<p>Take a look at <a href="https://plausible.io/plausible.io" rel="nofollow ugc">the live demo</a>.</p>
<p><strong>You need a subscription to Plausible Analytics to track your stats. There’s a free 30-day trial with no credit card required.</strong></p>
<p>We’re completely independent, self-funded, bootstrapped and debt-free. We’re not interested in raising funds or taking investment. We choose the subscription business model rather than surveillance capitalism. We’re operating a sustainable project funded solely by the fees that our subscribers pay us.</p>
<p><a href="https://plausible.io/" rel="nofollow ugc">Visit our website</a> for full details.</p>
<h3>Why use Plausible?</h3>
<p>Google Analytics is frustrating to use, difficult to understand, slow to load and privacy-invasive. That’s why we built Plausible Analytics, a simple but powerful, lightweight, open source and privacy-friendly alternative.</p>
<p>Here’s what makes Plausible a great Google Analytics alternative and why over 15,000 paying subscribers trust us with their website and business insights:</p>
<h3>Smooth transition from Google Analytics</h3>
<p>Plausible features a realtime dashboard, entry pages report and integration with Search Console. You can track your paid campaigns and conversions. You can invite team members. You can even <a href="https://plausible.io/docs/google-analytics-import" rel="nofollow ugc">import your historical stats from Google Analytics</a>. Learn how to get the most out of <a href="https://plausible.io/docs/your-plausible-experience" rel="nofollow ugc">your Plausible experience</a> and join thousands who have already migrated from Google Analytics.</p>
<h3>Simple analytics at a glance</h3>
<p>Plausible is simple analytics. It is easy to understand and it cuts through the noise. Check your site traffic and get all the essential insights on one page in one minute. There are no layers of menus, there is no need for you to build custom reports, custom dashboards or PowerPoint documents.</p>
<h3>Lightweight script that keeps your site speed fast</h3>
<p>Plausible is lightweight analytics. Our script is 75 times smaller than Google Analytics. Your page weight will be cut down, your site will load faster and you’ll reduce your carbon footprint for a greener and more sustainable web. A site with 100,000 monthly visitors can save 8.2 kg of CO2 emissions per year by switching.</p>
<h3>No need for cookie banners or GDPR consent</h3>
<p>Plausible is privacy-friendly analytics. All the site measurement is carried out absolutely anonymously. Cookies are not used and no personal data is collected. There are no persistent identifiers. No cross-site or cross-device tracking either. Your site data is not used for any other purposes. All visitor data is exclusively processed with servers owned and operated by European companies and it never leaves the EU.</p>
<h3>Track events and marketing campaigns</h3>
<p>Plausible is useful. Segment your audience by any metric you click on. Answer the important questions about your visitors, content and referral sources. Analyze paid campaigns using UTM parameters. Track scroll depth, site search terms, outbound link clicks, cloaked affiliate link clicks, file downloads, form completions, 404 error pages, post authors, post categories and custom taxonomies without manually configuring anything or writing any code.</p>
<h3>Built-in WooCommerce and Easy Digital Downloads analytics</h3>
<p>Plausible provides automated WooCommerce and Easy Digital Downloads analytics solutions to track conversions, revenue and attribution. Activities tracked include adding to cart, removing from cart, entering checkout and completing a purchase. A purchase funnel looking at the user journey from viewing a product to making a purchase is enabled to help you see the drop-off rates between the different steps, understand your cart abandonment rate and increase your conversions.</p>
<h3>Invite team members and share your dashboard</h3>
<p>Plausible is shareable. Your stats are private by default but you can choose to be transparent and make them public so anyone with your custom link can view them. You can also share your stats privately by generating a secure link. This link is impossible to guess but you can add password protection for extra security. You can invite team members and assign user roles too.</p>
<h3>Transparent and open source software</h3>
<p>Plausible is open source analytics. Our source code is available and accessible on GitHub so anyone can read it, inspect it and review it to verify that our actions match with our words. We welcome feedback and have a public roadmap. If you’re happy to manage your own infrastructure, you can self-host Plausible too.</p>
<h3>Features</h3>
<ul>
<li>Our product is updated several times per week and with our WordPress plugin you always have access to all the latest features</li>
<li>Automatically includes tracking code in the header of your site</li>
<li>Simple plugin settings page with easy options and an onboarding guide </li>
<li>Get more accurate stats and count those who use adblockers by running the Plausible script as a first-party connection from your domain name</li>
<li>View your Plausible stats directly in your WordPress dashboard (you can grant access to other user roles too)</li>
<li>Tracking of admin users is disabled by default (you can also disable tracking of other user roles)</li>
<li>Enable WooCommerce or Easy Digital Downloads revenue tracking</li>
<li>Enable file downloads, external link clicks, cloaked affiliate link clicks, site search terms, form completions and 404 error pages tracking </li>
<li>Enable automated tracking of post authors, post categories and custom taxonomies for better content analysis</li>
<li>Custom events and custom dimensions can be setup using CSS class names directly in the WordPress editor</li>
<li>Integrate with Google Search Console so you can see search queries people use to find your site in Google’s search results</li>
<li>Import your historical Google Analytics stats</li>
<li>Keep an eye on your traffic with weekly and/or monthly email and Slack reports</li>
<li>Get traffic spike notifications via email or Slack so you don’t miss being on the Hacker News</li>
<li>Tag your paid ads, emails and social media posts with UTM tags and analyze your ecommerce and marketing campaigns from click to conversion using marketing funnels </li>
<li>Filter the dashboard by any metric that you click on to get further insights. Mix and match filters too</li>
</ul>
<p>For more information: <a href="https://plausible.io/wordpress-analytics-plugin" rel="nofollow ugc">How to setup Plausible Analytics WordPress plugin</a>.</p>


Plausible Analytics

Plausible is a great privacy-focused alternative to Google Analytics. As far as the plugin goes, it does more than just insert a script tag. It also skips tracking for admin users and lets you specify a custom domain for the tracking script, if used. Nice clean interface and organized code. Thanks for this little helper plugin.

Does the trick

Plausible is super lightweight and works super easily right out of the box.

So glad to have found it. I was procrastinating on installing it for months because I experienced the difficulty of installing GA and thought I'd need to spend hours on this as well.

Turns out, it took me 10 minutes to sign up for an account at Plausible, install the WordPress plugin and I was done.

Now, I actually understand my analytics too. Before, I had installed GA but never really looked at it because it was too overwhelming. With Plausible, I look at it all the time because it's not only beautiful, but I actually know what I'm seeing and it's easy to drill down, just click on what you want to drill down into, and you go another level deeper. Easy.

Lastly, the founders are super responsive. I emailed them for some clarifications and they helped right away.

Really happy with Plausible!

Love it!


After demoing Plausible to my clients and explaining the privacy and ethical benefits, almost all of them have now moved from Google Analytics to Plausible. It's very easy to get everything up and running, the WordPress plugin works brilliantly, and they find using Plausible far more intuitive than GA.



Customer service response times are amazingly fast (often just a few minutes!) and have always been very helpful, including passing on feature requests to the development team then letting me know when they have been added to the plugin (e.g. the ability to choose which user roles are tracked and can view stats).



Very highly recommended indeed ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️


Brilliant privacy focused service, excellent plugin


I've installed Plausible on 4 client sites. It's GDPR privacy compliant, and really easy to use. You don't have to worry about configuring anything, you just activate the plugin and click through the setup guide. You can import legacy data from Universal Analytics, or add a module that tracks PDF downloads. The plugins displays these statistics right in the WP Admin Panel: unique visitors, total visits, total pageviews, views per visit, bounce rate, visit duration. Top sources for incoming traffic, top pages visited, location of visitors, and visitor devices. You get a lot of information without any complicate setup, and the GUI is very simple to understand. It's a paid service, but you'll save money in setup time. Technical support is top-notch too.


easy, thorough traffic reporting


The plugin overall works amazingly well. When something is not working as expected, the support responds at ninja-level speed with actionable solutions.



Would give 10 stars if I could!


Lightning fast support

Plausible Analytics is an easy-to-use, open source, lightweight and privacy-friendly web analytics alternative to Google Analytics.

CellarWeb Server Side Analytics vs Plausible Analytics