Independent Analytics – WordPress Analytics Plugin vs SlimStat Analytics

Google Analytics is complicated! You shouldn’t have to spend hours on tracking scripts, variables, dimensions, and other complexities just to answer basic questions about your visitors. That’s why we built Independent Analytics. Independent Analytics gives you simple, common-sense stats you can use to grow your website. It automatically tracks your visitors and adds easy-to-read reports right inside your WordPress admin dashboard. As a Google Analytics alternative, Independent Analytics also offers superior privacy for yourself and your visitors. It does not use cookies, store personal data, or communicate with external servers. All of your data is created and stored in your WP database. This is a free plugin and doesn’t require you to create an account on another site. Loved by the WP Community ❤️ Independent Analytics has received praise and renown from WP Tuts, Web Squadron, WP Weekly, WP Builds, and many more publications. Get Started in 60 Seconds Visit your Plugins > Add New menu Search for “Independent Analytics” Install and enjoy 🙂 Independent Analytics starts tracking visitors immediately. No JavaScript. No code snippets. No account to create. Just install and activate, and clear your cache once if you’re using a caching plugin. Your data starts showing up right away, so you can refresh the page and check how it’s going. Who’s it for? Bloggers: Find out which posts are getting traction without wading through a dashboard built for enterprise marketing teams. Use Independent Analytics for simple blog statistics and blog stats that show you what’s actually being read. Builders & agencies: Give your clients analytics that they can easily understand and access from within the WP dashboard. No more fielding questions about complex GA4 reports or Google Tag Manager configurations. eCommerce stores: Check which products get the most views and what visitors are searching for before buying. Uncover your most valuable traffic sources to streamline your marketing, and get more advanced eCommerce store analytics with the Pro version. News sites: You need same-day site stats and a fast way to see what’s resonating now. The analytics update in real-time and you can quickly check your post views in the Posts menu while you work. You might also enjoy the real-time dashboard included in the Pro version. Startups: Get straight to the most valuable data without digging through endless menus. Find out where your early adopters are coming from and what messaging resonates with them. Nonprofits: You want to know where your donors come from and which campaigns get attention, without using cookies that violate donor trust. Easily share analytics access with other team members to get everyone on board with using data to advance your mission. Fully Private for You and Your Visitors Without privacy friendly analytics, you could be at risk of violating regional privacy laws, such as the GDPR (DSGVO) or CCPA. Independent Analytics Analytics is a privacy first analytics solution designed from the ground up for legal compliance. No communication with external servers No cookies No personal data Skip the complexity of consent banners and data processing agreements by using self-hosted, cookieless analytics. What You Can Track Independent Analytics includes a wealth of metrics for understanding your visitors: Visitor tracking – track visitors across your site and see your unique visitor count, page views, and sessions. Engagement tracking – see how long people spend on your site, how often they “bounce,” and how many pages they view on average. Referral tracking – see your top referrers and traffic sources. Know which sites, search engines, AI platforms, and social networks send you traffic. Geographic tracking – see the countries and cities of your visitors. Device tracking – discover the device types people are using to access your site, including a mobile vs. desktop comparison. Campaign tracking – use UTM tracking to measure the performance of your marketing campaigns. Create UTM links and track results in the Campaigns report (Pro). Click tracking & link tracking – track clicks on any link or button. Includes outbound link tracking and download tracking for file download tracking (Pro). Form tracking & form analytics – automatically track form submissions across 20+ form plugins (Pro). Sales tracking & revenue tracking – connect your store for full eCommerce tracking with WooCommerce analytics and WooCommerce tracking. Also supports FluentCart, Easy Digital Downloads, SureCart, and PaidMembershipsPro (Pro). Metrics at a Glance Your analytics dashboard displays all the web analytics you need in one place: Page view and unique visitor counter Bounce rate and views per session Session duration and page view duration Popular posts and popular pages (top pages sorted by any metric) Top referrers and traffic sources Landing pages, entry pages, and exit pages Country statistics and city statistics with an interactive world map Device statistics, browser statistics, and operating system breakdowns Visitors growth and views growth Every metric updates in real-time so you always have fresh website traffic data. Filter, sort, and segment by date range, post type, author, and many other factors. Explore the Simple, Yet Powerful Features Our WordPress statistics plugin is more robust than a simple hit counter and includes all of the following features: Pages report – discover your most visited pages. Referrers report – find the sites sending you traffic. Geographic report – see which countries and cities your visitors are from. Devices report – get a breakdown of traffic by device type, browser, and operating system. CSV exporting – export any report to CSV for further analysis in tools like Excel or Looker Studio. PDF exporting – export any report as a beautiful PDF report to share with colleagues. Saved reports – create and save custom reports to the sidebar. Share access with authors – share access with any user role in a few clicks and optionally limit the stats to only content published by the author. White-label the dashboard – white-label the analytics for non-admins to remove any branding and external links. View counts in the Posts menu – check how many views your recent posts have while browsing the Posts menu. Dashboard widget – get a quick look at your stats when you login. Admin toolbar stats – see how many views each page has while viewing or editing it. Public view counter – show off how many views each post on your site has gotten. Ignore user roles – easily ignore activity from admins while recording traffic from .Subscribers and Customers. Ignore IP addresses – add any IP address to your ignore list in just two clicks. Automatically delete old data – delete data older than X months/years to limit the total data storage. Filtering system – segment your data with the powerful filters. Essential metrics – find your views, visitors, sessions, bounce rate, session duration, and views per session metrics in the Quick Stats, chart, and data table. Visitors Growth – find your fastest-growing pages and referrers. Author stats – sort and filter your pages by author. Post type stats – segment by post type to view stats for your posts, search results, custom post types, 404 pages, and more. Landing page stats – Use the Entrances metric to find your top landing pages. Developer API – the rudimentary developer API lets you get stats from any page on your site. RTL support – Independent Analytics works just as well for right-to-left languages. Mobile-friendly – the Analytics dashboard is fully compatible with mobile devices. Campaigns report (Pro) – create and track UTM campaign links. Real-time analytics (Pro) – see live visitors on your site right now. Click tracking (Pro) – track clicks on any link without touching code. eCommerce analytics (Pro) – integration with WooCommerce, FluentCart, EDD, SureCart, and PaidMembershipsPro. lets you find your most profitable campaigns, landing pages, and referrers. User journeys (Pro) – explore every recorded session including a timeline for each one, so you can understand exactly how visitors use your website. Form tracking (Pro) – automatically track form submissions and discover where your leads are coming from. Integration with 20+ top form plugins, such as WPForms, Contact Form 7, Fluent Forms, Gravity Forms, Mailchimp for WordPress, Ninja Forms, Formidable Forms, and more. Overview report (Pro) – create the perfect analytics dashboard for your website with the customizable Overview report. Solo reports (Pro) – view dedicated reports for individual pages and referrers. HTML email reports (Pro) – schedule a beautiful daily, weekly, or monthly email report for yourself and your clients. Explore every feature with screenshots here → Built for Speed and Accuracy Independent Analytics is a lightweight analytics plugin that won’t slow your site down. It uses a single, optimized database query to record each visit. No external scripts. No third-party requests. Without the need for a consent banner, your analytics are much more accurate. Only 31% of visitors accept cookie banners. Unlike sampling-based tools, every single visit is recorded and no additional data is simulated. What you see in the dashboard is what actually happened on your site. A Better Alternative If you’re tired of bloated or invasive analytics tools, Independent Analytics is a refreshing change. People use it as a: Google Analytics alternative – no account needed and no data sent to Google. All your website analytics stay on your server. Matomo alternative – lighter weight, easier to use, and fully self-hosted without needing to maintain a separate application. Jetpack Stats alternative – faster, more feature-rich, and doesn’t require a WordPress.com connection. MonsterInsights alternative – view your web analytics natively in WordPress without connecting to Google Analytics. Plausible alternative – similar privacy-first approach but fully free and self-hosted with no monthly fee. Fathom alternative – similar simple analytics philosophy, but free and hosted entirely on your own server. Clicky alternative – real-time analytics without sending your visitor data to an external service. WordPress Stats You Can Count On Independent Analytics is the WordPress stats plugin trusted by over 100,000 websites. Whether you need simple site stats for a personal blog or full website statistics for a growing business, it gives you everything in one plugin. Use it as your complete web analytics solution: track website traffic, monitor website traffic patterns over time, and understand where your visitors come from and what they do. It’s the WordPress analytics plugin the web has been missing. Independent Analytics Pro Get more valuable insights with the Independent Analytics Pro plugin, which includes UTM campaign tracking, real-time analytics, click event tracking, eCommerce sales tracking (WooCommerce, FluentCart, EDD, SureCart), user journeys, form conversion tracking, HTML email reports, and a customizable Overview report. Click here to get Independent Analytics Pro → Who Made This? Independent Analytics is designed and developed by Ben Sibley and Andrew Mead in the beautiful city of Philadelphia. Check out our interview on the WP Builds podcast if you’d like to hear our story.

Most analytics plugins quietly hand your visitors to someone else’s cloud. SlimStat doesn’t. Every pageview, click, and visitor lands in your own WordPress database and stays there: yours to read in real time, yours to purge whenever you want, never shipped off to Google or anyone else. See the whole story the moment it happens: who’s on your site right now, where they are in the world, what they’re reading, and which links they follow on the way out. Set a goal and watch it convert, or chain a few steps into a WooCommerce funnel and see exactly where people slip away. It’s the depth you’d expect from a hosted analytics service, running entirely on your own terms. Best part: privacy isn’t a setting you have to hunt for. Anonymized IPs, Do Not Track, a consent banner, and scheduled data cleanup are GDPR-ready from the first activation. Thousands of WordPress sites already trust SlimStat to keep their analytics honest, fast, and entirely their own. Main Features Real-time access log — Your site’s pulse, live. Watch each visit land the instant it happens: the page, the spot on the map, the search or link that sent them, how quickly your server replied, human or bot. Complete access log — Every visit in one searchable table. Drill into the full history and break it down by date, country, browser, OS, referrer, search term, or content type to answer the questions the summary charts can’t. Goals & funnels — Turn raw traffic into answers. Define a goal to measure a conversion (a WooCommerce sale, a signup, a key pageview) and see uniques, totals, and conversion rate. Or chain steps into a funnel to spot exactly where visitors drop off. One goal is free; up to five goals and full funnels unlock with Pro. Outbound link report — See which external links actually earn clicks. SlimStat records every outbound link your visitors follow, so you know what’s sending traffic off your site and which partnerships pull their weight. Know your visitors — Go past pageviews to the people behind them: returning readers, logged-in users, and a full audience breakdown by country, language, browser, OS, and screen size. (Pro’s User Overview adds per-visitor journeys, time on site, and Gravatars.) Your data, your server — No third-party cloud, no Google looking over your shoulder. Every byte lives in your WordPress database, and one-way IP hashing lets you count unique visitors without ever storing who they are. GDPR, sorted — Anonymize or hash IPs, honor Do Not Track, auto-purge old records on a schedule, and drop in a translatable consent banner that snaps straight into the WP Consent API (WPML and Polylang welcome). Compliance by design, not an afterthought. Admin bar stats — Keep an eye on the numbers without leaving your work. Online visitors, pageviews, and top pages sit one glance away in the WordPress admin bar, on every screen. Make every report yours — Rearrange, add, or hide widgets across Real-Time, Overview, Audience, Site Analysis, and Traffic Sources until each screen shows exactly what you care about. Shortcodes — Drop any report into a widget, post, or page with a single shortcode. Filters — Decide who counts. Skip your own team, known bots, whole IP ranges, admin pages, or entire countries so your stats reflect real visitors, not noise. Geolocation — Put a city and country to every visitor, plus their browser and operating system, powered by MaxMind and Browscap. World map — Watch your audience light up across the globe at a glance, even from your phone (map by JQVMap). Export & email — Download your reports as CSV files, generate user heatmaps, or get the day’s numbers in your inbox each morning (heatmaps and email reports via Pro). Cache-friendly — Plays nicely with W3 Total Cache, WP Super Cache, Cloudflare, and most caching plugins. Pro Pack Features Love the free plugin? Pro is for sites that live by their numbers. It adds the heavier tools without changing a thing about how SlimStat respects your data: Email reports — Wake up to the numbers that matter. Schedule the reports you care about and have them land in your inbox as clean HTML tables, with the columns laid out your way. Heatmaps — See exactly where visitors click, and where they don’t, with a heatmap layer painted right over your live pages. User overview — Follow individual registered users: what they viewed, how long they stayed, and how fast your server answered, with Gravatars to put a face to the visit. Extended overview — Add your own columns to the User Overview report and export file, so it tracks exactly what your site cares about. More goals & funnels — Up to five conversion goals and three full funnels, with ready-made templates for WooCommerce checkout, signups, and content engagement. Network analytics — Run reports and settings across an entire multisite network from one place. MaxMind integration — Connect MaxMind’s geolocation API for richer, more precise detail on where your visitors come from. Custom database — Store all your analytics in a separate, external database to keep your main WordPress DB lean. Export to Excel — Download any report as a ready-to-share Excel file. Requirements WordPress 5.6+ PHP 7.4+ MySQL 5.0.3+ At least 5 MB of free web space (240 MB if you plan on using the external libraries for geolocation and browser detection) At least 10 MB of free DB space At least 32 Mb of free PHP memory for the tracker (peak memory usage) Please note If you decide to uninstall Slimstat Analytics, all the stats will be PERMANENTLY deleted from your database. Make sure to setup a database backup (wp_slim_*) to avoid losing your data. Report Bugs Having trouble with a bug? Please create an issue on GitHub. Kindly note that GitHub is exclusively for bug reports; other inquiries will be closed. For security vulnerabilities, please report them through the Patchstack Vulnerability Disclosure Program. The Patchstack team will validate, triage, and handle any security issues.