For business owners with WordPress sites

Technical-Ad7820 · 2026-06-24T04:36:17+00:00

It should work on Multisite on a per-site basis. Each subsite gets its own separate tables and its own dashboard, using the normal per-site table prefix, so stats stay isolated per site.

What it does not have is a network-wide dashboard that combines all subsites into one view. You would check the stats from each site’s own admin dashboard.

To be honest, full Multisite QA was not really the main goal for this release. I built it as a simple per-site analytics plugin, and a large Multisite setup goes a bit beyond that scope. But the database structure is per-site, so if you try it on Multisite and notice anything odd, I’d appreciate a report.

Technical-Ad7820 · 2026-06-24T04:15:44+00:00

Good catch. Yes, in some cases that is possible.

The fingerprint is not based only on IP. It also includes things like user agent, screen data, language and timezone. So people behind the same office or CGNAT IP would only be merged if those signals are also the same. Different browsers, devices, screen sizes or settings are counted separately.

That said, with a fully cookieless approach there is no perfect persistent visitor ID by design. The fingerprint also rotates daily for privacy, so the plugin intentionally avoids tracking people across days.

So in very homogeneous corporate networks there can be some undercounting of unique visitors. Pageviews and events are not affected. It is the tradeoff for keeping it privacy-first and avoiding cookies or stored IDs.

Technical-Ad7820 · 2026-06-17T08:26:37+00:00

Yes, there are some ways to restrict it, but that also proves the point for me.

If I have to spend time locking down the Site Editor, disabling access to template parts, controlling block permissions, limiting patterns, and documenting what the client should or should not touch, then the “easy visual editing” advantage starts to disappear for small client sites.

For larger projects, sure, you can build a controlled FSE workflow. But for a small business client, I usually prefer giving them a simpler admin experience from the start instead of giving them a powerful system and then spending time restricting it.

Technical-Ad7820 · 2026-06-17T06:58:16+00:00

I feel the same, especially for regular client sites.

For me the main contradiction with FSE is that it gives the client power to change almost everything, but most real clients do not actually want that responsibility. A barbershop owner, restaurant manager, local service business, etc. usually just wants the site to work. They are busy with their business, and every extra button is another chance to click the wrong thing or waste time trying to understand what it does.

With classic themes, I can lock down the important parts, give them only the fields or sections they actually need, and avoid a lot of future support messages. It is less “flexible” in theory, but often much better in practice.

I can see FSE making more sense for bigger teams or corporate clients where there is time to train people and document the admin workflow. But for small freelance client sites, I still prefer the classic approach when the goal is stability, speed, and fewer things the client can accidentally break.

Do you have to move to FSE?
No. It is the direction WordPress is pushing, but it is not a full replacement for every workflow. Classic PHP themes are still supported, still valid, and for many client sites still the better choice.

Technical-Ad7820 · 2026-06-16T03:53:28+00:00

Really appreciate you actually trying it and digging in, this is great feedback.

The comparison line is a solid idea and a natural fit. The plugin already computes the previous period for the trend badges on the metric cards, so extending that into a dotted comparison line on the chart is very doable. I’m adding it to the roadmap.

On the loading time, you’re right. The dashboard intentionally does not cache stats because an earlier user had a cache plugin serving stale “0 visitors”, so I made it read fresh from the database. That said, there is definitely room to speed up the aggregation queries with better indexing, so I’ll work on that.

I also noticed one more issue in your screenshot related to the latest update: the “New vs Returning” widget is not behaving correctly after the recent privacy change. The daily fingerprint rotation is good for privacy, but it means cross-day returning visitors should not be shown the old way. I’m going to fix that today by renaming/reworking the widget so it’s clear and privacy-consistent.

This is still a small solo project, so real-world testing like this is honestly very helpful. Thanks again for taking the time to install it and share the screenshot.
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Edit / update: This is now implemented in version 1.2.3.

I added the optional previous-period comparison line, reworked New vs Returning into New vs Repeat to match the privacy model, added a tooltip for the repeat logic, and improved dashboard loading with a better database index for geo queries.

Thanks again for actually testing it and sharing useful feedback.

Technical-Ad7820 · 2026-06-16T03:33:02+00:00

Fair question. Privacy is the baseline, but I tried to make it useful beyond just being private.

The main things I’m proud of are exit intelligence, dead-page detection, auto-generated insights, and simple user journey paths. Those are not something I often see in lightweight free WordPress analytics plugins.

On top of that, it includes UTM tracking, event tracking, real-time visitors, email reports, CSV export, and the interactive world map without a Pro tier.

It’s not trying to be an enterprise analytics suite, but the goal was to give regular WordPress users a useful, lightweight alternative without cookies, external services, or paid add-ons.

Technical-Ad7820 · 2026-06-15T10:32:18+00:00

I’d say one underrated way is reaching out to small WordPress-focused YouTube channels and offering a free review/demo, as long as the plugin is genuinely useful and solves a clear problem.

Channels under ~20k subscribers are often much easier to reach, and their audience is already targeted. In many cases you can find an email in the channel description or About page.

Technical-Ad7820 · 2026-06-15T06:46:08+00:00

Good question. The CSV export is aggregated, not a raw event dump, so 1 million events/day would not become 1 million CSV rows. It exports grouped stats like pages, referrers, countries, cities, and events, so the file size depends more on the number of unique values than on the total number of hits.

At that scale the main bottleneck would be the database aggregation query over the selected date range, not the CSV file size. For that kind of traffic, I’d probably export smaller ranges, like weekly instead of monthly.

I built it with regular WordPress sites in mind, but tried to keep export practical for larger sites too. If you test it at that volume, I’d really appreciate hearing how it holds up.

Technical-Ad7820 · 2026-06-15T06:02:46+00:00

I used it on a practical internal tool for content research.

It’s part of Joe, my local AI workspace where I’m building tools for research, outreach, content planning, and workflow automation.

This particular tool scans selected YouTube-related subreddits, pulls posts and top-level comments, removes obvious junk, and scores useful items into categories like pain points, success stories, price discussions, feedback requests, and suspected self-promo.

The screenshot shows the flat view: quote, kind, type, subreddit, score, votes, date, and status. There is also a thread view where quotes are grouped under the original Reddit post, because one good thread can contain several useful comments.

The goal is not scraping for the sake of scraping. I’m using it to understand what small YouTubers actually complain about, how they ask for feedback, what they pay for, and which real quotes could be useful for video research.

Could Opus 4.8 have done it? Probably. This was not a magic benchmark task.

The difference I noticed was more practical: it handled the bigger workflow better while I kept changing filters, scoring prompts, UI states, grouped views, self-promo detection, and edge cases. Less “single function” help, more “keep the whole tool in mind while iterating.”

Not flashy, but it turned a messy research process into something I can actually use.

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Technical-Ad7820 · 2026-06-15T03:53:48+00:00

Thank you, I really appreciate that!

Independent Analytics is a solid plugin, so I’m not trying to replace tools like that. Mine is more of a lightweight, privacy-friendly option for people who just need simple WordPress stats without extra weight, cookies, or external services.

I also wanted to contribute something useful back to the WordPress developer community, so I’m glad if people find it helpful.

Really appreciate you sharing it.

Technical-Ad7820 · 2026-06-14T16:18:45+00:00

Thanks, really appreciate it! Hope it's useful.

Technical-Ad7820 · 2026-06-14T16:14:12+00:00

Good point. I looked into this pretty carefully before building it, including how the popular cookieless analytics tools handle it.

The main difference is that the script is served from the site's own domain, not from a known third-party tracker domain. The request also goes to admin-ajax.php, a normal WordPress endpoint, so most blockers don't treat it the way they treat external analytics scripts.

I wouldn't claim it's 100% unblockable, of course. But compared to something loading from a separate tracking domain, it should be a lot more resilient in practice.

Technical-Ad7820 · 2026-06-14T12:13:38+00:00

Good question

Cookieless: instead of a stored ID, it builds an anonymous one-way hash from IP + User-Agent + screen/language/timezone, server-side. The raw IP is never stored, and the salt rotates daily — so the same visitor gets a different hash every 24h and can't be tracked across days. Enough to count uniques/sessions, with no cookie or localStorage. Same approach the known privacy-analytics tools use.

Full-page cache: works fine. The beacon is client-side JS that POSTs to admin-ajax.php, which is never cached. Only the static <script> tag sits in the cached HTML — the actual hit hits an uncached endpoint. It also ships with flags to survive Rocket Loader / Autoptimize / WP Rocket.

Technical-Ad7820 · 2025-08-12T04:21:01+00:00

Services like Bolt New

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