james333

VisitStats is a lightweight, privacy-first analytics plugin for WordPress. All your data stays in your own WordPress database — we never see it, no third party sees it.
Why VisitStats?
<ul>
<li>No cookies, no consent banner needed. Tracking is GDPR-friendly by default.</li>
<li>Self-hosted. All data lives in your WordPress database. No external service, no Automattic, no Google.</li>
<li>Lightweight. Frontend tracker is under 2KB. Loads asynchronously. Won’t slow your site.</li>
<li>Zero setup. Install, activate, done. No theme edits, no tag manager, no JS snippets.</li>
<li>Built for WordPress. Reports appear inside your WordPress dashboard — no separate app to log into.</li>
</ul>
Recommended for sites with up to ~10,000 daily pageviews (around 95% of WordPress sites). For very high-traffic sites, consider dedicated analytics services.
What you get (all free, all the time):
<ul>
<li>Real-time visitor count — see who’s on your site right now</li>
<li>Pageviews, unique visitors, sessions</li>
<li>Top pages</li>
<li>Top traffic sources (direct, search, social, AI, referral)</li>
<li>Top referrers — actual URLs sending you traffic</li>
<li>Device breakdown (desktop, mobile, tablet)</li>
<li>Browser & operating system detection</li>
<li>Configurable data retention from 1 day up to 1 year</li>
<li>Date range views: today, 7 days, 30 days, 90 days, 1 year</li>
<li>Engagement signals (scroll depth, time on page)</li>
<li>Cookieless visitor identification using daily-rotating salt + SHA-256 hashing</li>
<li>Bot filtering with built-in bot signature detection</li>
<li>Optional administrator / logged-in user exclusion</li>
<li>Honors Do Not Track browser signal</li>
<li>Automatic data pruning to keep your database lean</li>
<li>Rate-limited tracking endpoint protects against abuse</li>
<li>IP anonymization before hashing — actual IPs never stored</li>
</ul>
Privacy by design
VisitStats never:
<ul>
<li>Sets cookies</li>
<li>Stores IP addresses</li>
<li>Sends data to third parties</li>
<li>Fingerprints visitors</li>
<li>Tracks across days</li>
</ul>
Visitor identification uses a daily-rotating salt hashed with the (anonymized) IP and User Agent to count unique visits within a 24-hour window. The salt regenerates every 24 hours, making cross-day tracking impossible. This is the same approach used by Plausible Analytics and Fathom Analytics.
For developers
<ul>
<li>Clean REST API at <code>/wp-json/visitstats/v1/</code></li>
<li>Filter hooks for customizing behavior (rate limiting, bot detection, etc.)</li>
<li>PSR-style class organization</li>
<li>No external dependencies — pure WordPress core</li>
</ul>

VisitStats

Privacy-first site analytics for self-hosted sites. No cookies, no Google, no data leaves your server. Stats live in your own database.

Stefan Klaes

Simplest Analytics tracks visits and unique users session based serverside without setting 3rd party cookies. It is also possible to track events and url paramaters. After 
installing and activation the plugin it’s working without further configuration. If you want to set up custom tracking events or url parameters you can use the settings tab in 
the WordPress backend.
<h4>Why use Simplest Analytics?</h4>
It is working. No function overload. Track visits, unique users and custom events like clicks.
<h4>What are the main features of the plugin?</h4>
<ul>
<li>Track page visits and unique users</li>
<li>Track traffic on sites</li>
<li>Track where your traffic comes from</li>
<li>Track where your woocommerce sales come from</li>
<li>Track custom events when a user clicks an element</li>
<li>Track the use of url parameters like your-site.com/?campaign=whatever</li>
<li>Track video views (1sec, 25%, 50%, 75%, 100%)</li>
</ul>
<h3>Custom function you can use to track further events</h3>
You can use this function to track further events in php hooks like form submissions, apply coupons, add to cart, etc:
$data = []; 
$data[‘track_type’] = “event”; // event or pageview 
$data[‘event_action’] = “yourevent”; // name of the event 
simple_analytics_track_data($data); // function that saves the event
<h4>How are the charts in the admin dashboard generated?</h4>
The charts are based on google-charts.js which only load in the admin backend. The data is stored in the database on the same server where your WordPress installation 
is located.

Simplest Analytics

Simple webanalytics stored in the own database without setting cookies.

VisitStats vs Simplest Analytics