Simple Webstats is an analytics plugin for WordPress websites. It was built as a labour of love after several clients asked for suggestions for alternatives to Google Analytics.
Most website owners want to be able to see how people interact with their sites. It’s essential for seeing what works and what doesn’t, where traffic is coming from, what people are interesting in. But they don’t need to track users across the whole internet, store their personal information or otherwise invade their privacy.
Simple Webstats requires no setup – just install it, activate it, and you’re done. There’s no need to log into a cloud service to view your website visitor data, it’s right there in your WordPress admin area. It’s GDPR compliant, collects no personal data, requires no opt-ins and sets no cookies.
It’s available for free from the wordpress.org plugin directory.
For years the defacto analytics solution has been GA, which remains a very powerful tool – but it’s not without issues.
GA (and others) are free because of the value of the data gained from it. It tracks users across every website that uses it, and ties all of that data together – building up a detailed profile of everyone who visits them, which can be used or sold for marketing purposes.
In these days of GDPR and PECR, that requires user consent – which is why we see so many ugly and sometimes deceptive opt-in popups on websites now for cookies. But if we don’t collect personal data, and don’t use cookies, we no longer need them.
Additionally, so many users now use tracker blockers or similar technologies that you’re only ever seeing a subset of visitor statistics.
We believe that you don’t need personal data or tracking cookies to collect usable, aggregate statistics.
Simple Webstats doesn’t store anything identifiable, like IP addresses. It generates a random hash for each visitor that can’t be reversed, and keeps track of data points like page views, country of origin, referring domains etc. All of this data is stored locally in your WordPress database – you own it.
It doesn’t do as much as things like Google Analytics do, but it’s easy to use, it respects digital privacy, and we’re releasing new functionality regularly.
If you’re interested in trying it out, check it out on the WordPress Plugin Directory.
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