Honest Analytics

What it is

Honest Analytics is cookieless analytics that lives inside WordPress. You see your visitors, your pages and your trends in the dashboard you already use, without wrestling with GA4 and without sending anything to another company. It stores no IP addresses and no per-visitor rows.

It’s a WordPress port of Craft Analytics, a Craft CMS plugin from Coysh Digital. The free edition is on GitHub, and a Pro edition is available from the site.

Why I built it

I built Honest Analytics for sites I actually look after. I wanted proper reports without asking visitors to accept tracking they didn’t need, and without sending everything to another company.

The choices were either too invasive, too complicated, or too limited. This is the version I wanted to install.

Technical notes

• A visitor is a 16-character hash of a daily salt, the address, the user agent and the site. The salt is overwritten every 24 hours, and daily unique visitors are estimated with HyperLogLog sketches, accurate to about ±1.6%.
• No IP address is ever stored. A test searches every table, the spool and the debug log for a known address to prove it.
• It counts accurately behind page caches: the server counts the request, a 1.8KB first-party tracker confirms it, and a per-visitor nonce stops double counting.
• Hits go to a file spool and are folded into rollups, so storage grows with dimensions and time rather than with pageviews.
• It respects the Global Privacy Control signal, and it can import history from GA4, WP Statistics and Independent Analytics.
• The free edition is generated from the private source, with the paid code stripped out.