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.

sitesights

Sitesights Analytics is a cookieless and privacy-first web analytics alternative to Google Analytics.
<h3>Third Party Services</h3>
This plugin will include the following service as a JS file on every page view of your WordPress. 
It depends on the exchange of data with https://sitesights.io, an external service. 
This interaction is essential for transmitting relevant analytics data to the SiteSights database, 
enabling the analysis of visitor behavior and facilitating additional analytical queries. For 
further details, please refer to the Terms of Service and Privacy Policies at the following links: 
Terms of Service: https://sitesights.io/terms/ 
Privacy Policy: https://sitesights.io/privacy/

Sitesights Analytics

Sitesights Analytics is a cookieless and privacy-first web analytics alternative to Google Analytics.

VisitStats vs Sitesights Analytics