james333

<p><strong>VisitStats</strong> 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.</p>
<p><strong>Why VisitStats?</strong></p>
<ul>
<li><strong>No cookies, no consent banner needed.</strong> Tracking is GDPR-friendly by default.</li>
<li><strong>Self-hosted.</strong> All data lives in your WordPress database. No external service, no Automattic, no Google.</li>
<li><strong>Lightweight.</strong> Frontend tracker is under 2KB. Loads asynchronously. Won’t slow your site.</li>
<li><strong>Zero setup.</strong> Install, activate, done. No theme edits, no tag manager, no JS snippets.</li>
<li><strong>Built for WordPress.</strong> Reports appear inside your WordPress dashboard — no separate app to log into.</li>
</ul>
<p><strong>Recommended for sites with up to ~10,000 daily pageviews</strong> (around 95% of WordPress sites). For very high-traffic sites, consider dedicated analytics services.</p>
<p><strong>What you get (all free, all the time):</strong></p>
<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>
<p><strong>Privacy by design</strong></p>
<p>VisitStats never:</p>
<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>
<p>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.</p>
<p><strong>For developers</strong></p>
<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.

zenmarkup

anthonyzen

<p>Self-hosted website analytics for WordPress. All data is stored in your WordPress database and never sent to third-party services. The tracker is cookieless and loads no external resources, making the plugin GDPR, CCPA, and PECR friendly by default — no consent banner required.</p>
<p>Once activated, the plugin starts collecting anonymous visitor data and displays a full analytics dashboard inside WP Admin.</p>
<h4>Features</h4>
<ul>
<li>Real-time visitor counter</li>
<li>Pageviews, unique visitors, bounce rate, and average session duration</li>
<li>Interactive SVG world map with zoom, pan, and country/city drill-down</li>
<li>UTM campaign tracking with automatic URL cleanup</li>
<li>Event tracking — outbound links, file downloads, mailto and tel clicks, 404 pages</li>
<li>Custom events via data attributes or JavaScript API</li>
<li>Smart insights — exit pages, dead pages, user journeys</li>
<li>24-hour peak activity chart</li>
<li>New vs repeat visitor breakdown (single vs multiple sessions in a day)</li>
<li>Device, browser, and operating system detection (server-side)</li>
<li>Weekly or monthly email reports</li>
<li>CSV export on every dashboard tab</li>
<li>Date range selector with custom ranges</li>
<li>Role-based dashboard access control</li>
<li>Configurable data retention (7–365 days)</li>
<li>IP exclusion list and admin traffic filtering</li>
<li>Bot traffic analysis</li>
</ul>
<h4>Privacy by design</h4>
<ul>
<li>No cookies, no localStorage, no sessionStorage</li>
<li>IP addresses are never stored — only an irreversible SHA-256 hash is used internally</li>
<li>Geolocation is resolved locally on your server (optional) — only country and city names are stored</li>
<li>No personal identifiers — no names, emails, or login state tracked</li>
<li>GDPR, CCPA, and PECR friendly by default</li>
</ul>
<h4>Zero external resources</h4>
<p>The admin dashboard loads no fonts from third-party CDNs, no remote scripts, and no external stylesheets. Every byte is served from your own server, so the admin’s IP address is never leaked to third parties while viewing analytics.</p>
<h4>Compatibility</h4>
<p>The tracking script is async, non-blocking, and under 5KB. It works with common caching and optimization plugins by using <code>admin-ajax.php</code> for data collection, which bypasses page caching.</p>
<h4>Who is it for?</h4>
<ul>
<li>Site owners who want analytics without a consent banner</li>
<li>GDPR-regulated businesses that need compliant analytics out of the box</li>
<li>Agencies managing multiple WordPress sites</li>
<li>Developers who prefer self-hosted, zero-dependency tooling</li>
</ul>
<p>Built by <a href="https://zenmarkup.com" rel="nofollow ugc">ZenMarkup</a>.</p>
<h3>External services</h3>
<p>This plugin connects to a single third-party service under the conditions described below. The connection can be fully disabled by toggling “Geolocation” off in Analytics <span aria-hidden="true" class="wp-exclude-emoji">→</span> Settings <span aria-hidden="true" class="wp-exclude-emoji">→</span> General. Visitor data is never sent to any third party.</p>
<h4>jsDelivr CDN (cdn.jsdelivr.net)</h4>
<p>When the geolocation feature is enabled, the plugin downloads a static IP geolocation database file from jsDelivr CDN about once per month. The database is hosted as a public npm package (dbip-city-lite) and contains no user-specific data — it is the same file served to every site that requests it.</p>
<p>What is sent: a standard HTTPS GET request from your server. No visitor data, site identifiers, or telemetry are included.<br />
What is received: a gzipped database file, approximately 19 MB (dbip-city-lite.mmdb.gz).<br />
When: shortly after the geolocation feature is first enabled, then approximately once per month via WP-Cron, and whenever an admin clicks the “Update database now” button on the Settings page.<br />
Where it is stored: wp-content/uploads/zenmarkup-pa/dbip-city-lite.mmdb (after extraction).</p>
<ul>
<li>Source URL: https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/dbip-city-lite/dbip-city-lite.mmdb.gz</li>
<li>Service provider: jsDelivr — https://www.jsdelivr.com/ — Privacy policy: https://www.jsdelivr.com/terms/privacy-policy</li>
<li>Database provider: DB-IP — https://db-ip.com/ — License: CC-BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)</li>
</ul>
<h4>No per-visitor external requests</h4>
<p>After the database has been downloaded, ALL geolocation lookups happen locally on your own server using the bundled MaxMind GeoIP2 PHP reader. Visitor IP addresses are NEVER transmitted to any external service.</p>
<p>To stop all external requests entirely, set “Geolocation” to OFF in Analytics <span aria-hidden="true" class="wp-exclude-emoji">→</span> Settings <span aria-hidden="true" class="wp-exclude-emoji">→</span> General. The plugin continues to work without country and city data.</p>
<h3>Development</h3>
<p>The plugin ships with both minified production bundles and their unminified sources, so every byte of JavaScript and CSS can be reviewed, studied, and modified without any external tooling. No remote repository or compilation step is required to inspect the code.</p>
<p>Shipped sources:</p>
<ul>
<li>admin/assets/js/src/ — ES module sources that esbuild bundles into admin/assets/js/dashboard.min.js (the single file loaded on the admin dashboard). A source map is also shipped as dashboard.min.js.map.</li>
<li>admin/assets/css/dashboard.css — unminified source for admin/assets/css/dashboard.min.css.</li>
<li>public/tracker.js — unminified source for public/tracker.min.js (the frontend beacon, <5KB).</li>
</ul>
<p>Rebuilding the minified bundles (optional):</p>
<ol>
<li>Install Node.js 18 or newer.</li>
<li>From the plugin directory run: npm install</li>
<li>Then run: npm run build</li>
</ol>
<p>The build script uses esbuild (a pure Node dependency declared in package.json) — no remote downloads at runtime, no other build tooling, no framework.</p>
<h3>Third Party Notices</h3>
<p>This plugin includes the following third-party assets.</p>
<h4>SVG World Map</h4>
<ul>
<li>File: admin/assets/svg/world-map.min.svg</li>
<li>Source: Simplemaps.com (https://simplemaps.com/resources/svg-maps), via sirLisko/world-map-country-shapes on GitHub (https://github.com/sirLisko/world-map-country-shapes)</li>
<li>License: MIT</li>
<li>Copyright: 2015 Pareto Software, LLC DBA Simplemaps.com</li>
</ul>
<p>MIT License text:</p>
<p>The MIT License (MIT)</p>
<p>Copyright (c) 2015 Pareto Software, LLC DBA Simplemaps.com</p>
<p>Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the “Software”), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:</p>
<p>The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.</p>
<p>THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED “AS IS”, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.</p>
<h4>DB-IP City Lite</h4>
<ul>
<li>File: downloaded into wp-content/uploads/zenmarkup-pa/dbip-city-lite.mmdb at runtime (not bundled in the plugin .zip)</li>
<li>Source: https://db-ip.com/db/lite.php (distributed via the dbip-city-lite npm package on jsDelivr CDN)</li>
<li>License: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC-BY 4.0) — https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/</li>
<li>Attribution: IP Geolocation by DB-IP — https://db-ip.com</li>
</ul>
<h4>GeoIP2 PHP API</h4>
<ul>
<li>Files: includes/vendor-scoped/GeoIp2/</li>
<li>Source: https://github.com/maxmind/GeoIP2-php</li>
<li>License: Apache License 2.0 — https://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0</li>
<li>Copyright: 2013-2024 MaxMind, Inc.</li>
<li>Bundled with a prefixed namespace (ZMPA\Vendor\GeoIp2) so it cannot collide with other plugins shipping the same library.</li>
</ul>
<h4>MaxMind DB Reader</h4>
<ul>
<li>Files: includes/vendor-scoped/MaxMind/</li>
<li>Source: https://github.com/maxmind/MaxMind-DB-Reader-php</li>
<li>License: Apache License 2.0 — https://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0</li>
<li>Copyright: 2014-2024 MaxMind, Inc.</li>
<li>Bundled with a prefixed namespace (ZMPA\Vendor\MaxMind) so it cannot collide with other plugins shipping the same library.</li>
</ul>


ZenMarkup Privacy Analytics

Cookie-free, self-hosted analytics for WordPress. GDPR-ready by default, no consent banner, no external services.

VisitStats vs ZenMarkup Privacy Analytics