If you run a website, you want to know who is visiting it. The stats that come with a lot of hosting, such as AWStats in Plesk, read the server logs, so half of what they report is bots, the pages are hard to read, and a simple question like “did anyone look at that page I wrote last week?” takes more digging than it should.
Visitor Insights is the answer I wanted: a WordPress plugin that tells you everything you’d want to know about who visits your site, on one page you can read at a glance. It’s free.
Privacy comes first
I’m a big privacy advocate, so nothing I ever write will steal your soul. Visitor Insights uses no cookies, stores no IP addresses and sends nothing to anyone else’s servers. Everything stays in your own WordPress database, and a visitor can’t be followed from one day to the next. Your visitors get counted. They don’t get watched.
The idea
- One page, everything on it. No digging through menus. The numbers at the top, a chart, then the boxes underneath: pages, sources, countries, devices.
- Click to dig in. Click anything and the whole report filters down to it. Click a country and every box shows only the people from there. Click a page and you see only the visitors to that page.
- Compare with last time. A number on its own means nothing, so every figure shows whether it’s up or down against the previous period.
- Real people only. It counts visitors with a little JavaScript rather than reading server logs, so most bots never get counted. It also ignores you when you’re logged in as an admin.
What you get
- Visitors, pageviews, visits, bounce rate and how long people stay
- Top pages, where people arrive, where they leave, 404 errors, and what they search for on your site
- Where they came from: search, social, other sites, email and campaigns
- Countries, devices, browsers, operating systems and screen sizes
- Clicks on outbound links, downloads, email and phone links
- A live view of who’s on the site right now
- A map of which days and hours are busiest
- Any table as a CSV, a summary on the WordPress dashboard, and a setting to delete old data automatically
The catches
It can only show countries if your server or Cloudflare tells WordPress which country a visitor is in. If yours doesn’t, the Countries box stays empty. A visitor is counted fresh each day, so the visitor figure over a month is really the total of the daily figures. And it only starts counting when you switch it on, so it can’t bring your old stats history with it.
Updates
From version 1.1.0 the plugin checks for updates twice a day and offers them on the Plugins page like any other plugin, so updating is one click. You can also switch on automatic updates there, or under Insights › Settings, and forget about it. If you installed version 1.0.0, upload 1.1.0 once by hand and updates will look after themselves from then on.
Download it, it’s free
Visitor Insights is released under the GPL (version 2 or later), the same licence as WordPress, so you can use it, change it and share it. It’s brand new, so there may be a rough edge or two. If you find one, I’d like to hear about it.
Download visitor-insights-1.1.0.zip (version 1.1.0, about 30 KB)
To install it, go to your WordPress admin, then Plugins › Add New › Upload Plugin, choose the zip and activate it. You’ll find it under Insights in the admin menu. To see your first visit, open your site in a private window while logged out.
It needs WordPress 5.8 or newer and PHP 7.4 or newer, and nothing else.