ConvertNow Analytics: cookieless analytics for WordPress
ConvertNow Analytics is a WordPress plugin that puts 31 report screens inside wp-admin and keeps every figure in your own database. It sets no cookie, needs no consent banner and sends nothing to a third party. That is what cookieless analytics means here: your numbers, your server, nobody in the middle.
- 31 report screens
- ~1.5 KB on your pages
- Cookieless analytics, no banner
Cookieless analytics running in about two minutes
Setting up ConvertNow Analytics takes three steps and no account. There is no script to paste into your theme, no key to enter, and no dashboard on somebody else’s server to log into. You install the plugin, activate it, and your traffic appears in the WordPress admin next to everything else you manage.
Download it
Fill in the short form below and the zip starts straight away. Cookieless analytics is free here, so it takes a name, an email and the domain you will run it on. The link arrives in your inbox at the same moment, in case you need it again later.
Install and activate
In WordPress go to Plugins, Add New, Upload Plugin, choose the zip and press Activate. There is nothing to configure, nothing to paste and nothing to sign into. Activating is the whole of the setup.
Watch it fill in
Visits appear within seconds, and because this is cookieless analytics there is no banner to accept first. Reports build as traffic arrives, and yesterday is summarised overnight so a twelve month view loads as fast as a one day view.
Two things we do differently, and why
The plugin never phones home. There is no key to verify, so once it is installed your site has no reason to contact us again. Your host’s firewall, our maintenance window and a DNS wobble cannot touch it, because nothing about your analytics depends on our servers being up.
Your numbers live in your database, not ours. Every pageview, referrer and report is written to your own WordPress install on your own hosting. We could not read your traffic if we wanted to, which is also why there is no cookie banner to clear before the counting starts.
What ConvertNow Analytics gives you
Not a data warehouse and not a funnel builder. ConvertNow Analytics answers the questions a site owner asks on a Monday morning, starting with which bylines earn traffic. All of it is cookieless analytics, so none of it waits on a banner being accepted, and all of it works the moment you activate the plugin.
It tells you who wrote what they read
Most analytics tells you how many people visited. If you run a blog with more than one writer, a magazine or anything with a masthead, the real question is which bylines earn traffic. The author is recorded on every pageview, so Authors, Fastest-Growing Authors, Blog Posts and Content Types are there on day one. No CSV export and no doing it by hand.
Real numbers, not estimates
Cookieless analytics does not mean vague analytics. Visitors, visits, views, views per visit, bounce rate and time on page are counted directly. Bounce rate means what everyone else means by it: a visit that saw exactly one page. Time on page comes from an engagement beacon rather than being guessed from timestamps, and counts only while the tab is actually visible.
Goals, funnels and journeys
Mark a page as a result, optionally only when somebody also read far enough or stayed long enough. Build an ordered funnel and see the drop at every step, with the order enforced so a route run backwards converts nobody. Journeys show the paths people actually take. Each is created on the screen that shows it, in about fifteen seconds, not buried in settings.
Cookieless analytics by design
No cookie, no local storage, no persistent identifier. Visitors are counted with a one-way SHA256 hash of address, browser and a salt that rotates every UTC day, so yesterday’s visitor cannot be matched to today’s. Raw IP addresses are never written to your database. That is what cookieless analytics actually means, and it is why most sites running it need no consent banner.
Cookieless analytics knows the country too
Geography is the part most cookieless analytics tools get wrong, because the usual fix is an outside lookup service. Two plain text country tables ship inside the plugin, covering IPv4 and IPv6. A lookup reads one 512 byte block, takes about three microseconds, touches no database and leaves no server. Country data by DB-IP, used under CC BY 4.0.
Built to stay light
The tracker is inlined into your footer using the browser’s own Beacon API, so a measured pageview costs no extra HTTP request and about 1.5 KB over the wire. Raw hits are summarised hourly into small daily tables, so a twelve month report runs the same handful of queries as a twenty-four hour one. Every chart is hand-drawn SVG: no charting library, no mapping library.
ConvertNow Analytics compared with Google Analytics 4
Google Analytics is a formidable tool and it is free at the point of use. What it is not is simple to run lawfully in Europe, quick to read, or private, and it will not tell you which of your writers earns traffic without work. That is the gap ConvertNow Analytics fills as a cookieless analytics alternative. Here is the honest difference for a typical WordPress site, and where cookieless analytics gives something up.
| ConvertNow Analytics | Google Analytics 4 | |
|---|---|---|
| Cookies set | None | First-party cookies by default |
| Consent banner | Generally not needed | Normally required in the EU and UK |
| Where the data lives | Your own database | Google’s infrastructure |
| Reporting by author | Built in, on by default | Custom dimension and tag work |
| Account needed | None, and no licence key | A Google account and a property |
| Data retention | You choose, forever if you like | 14 months by default for event data |
| Sampling | Never | Applied on large or complex queries |
| Where you read it | Inside wp-admin | A separate product to log into |
| Raw data out | CSV, TSV, JSON or NDJSON, any period | BigQuery export |
| Page weight added | ~1.5 KB, no extra request | Tens of KB from an external domain |
| Ad blocker impact | Not a known tracker domain | Widely blocked |
| Cross-site profiling | Impossible by design | Part of the product |
| Returning visitors across days | Cannot be measured, by design | Measured |
| Click and event tracking | Optional, one type at a time | Event model throughout |
| Ads and conversion integration | None | Native to Google Ads |
| Cost | Free, GPLv2 or later | Free, with paid 360 tier |
The last three rows go the other way on purpose. A visitor hash that is re-salted every day cannot follow anybody into next week, so week-over-week retention is a question this data genuinely cannot answer, and we would rather say so than print a number that looks like it. If your work depends on ad attribution, GA4 is the right tool and you should use it.
Written in good faith in 2026 and accurate as far as we know. Google’s product changes often, so check the current GA4 data retention documentation before relying on any row above. If you spot something out of date, tell us and we will correct it.
On the legal side, the ground truth is the GDPR text itself and, for cookies specifically in the UK, the ICO guidance on cookies and similar technologies. We are not lawyers and this page is not legal advice.
Ten groups of ConvertNow Analytics screens
Every menu group starts with an at a glance screen covering the whole section, then the individual reports underneath. The bold entries are those summaries. Each report opens on the same page rather than loading a new admin screen, and every chart on every one of them exports as a PNG or a JPG from a button in its own header. None is held back, because there is no paid tier to hold it back for.
Editorial
- Editorial at a Glance
- Authors
- Fastest-Growing Authors
- Blog Posts
- Content Types
Pages
- Pages at a Glance
- Top Landing Pages
- Fastest-Growing Pages
- Today
- Exit Pages
Referrers
- Referrers at a Glance
- Search Engine Traffic
- Social Media Traffic
- Fastest-Growing Referrers
- Last 7 Days
- Channels
- All Referrers
Campaigns
- Campaigns at a Glance
- UTM Sources
- UTM Mediums
- UTM Campaigns
- Fastest-Growing Campaigns
Geographic
- Geographic at a Glance
- Countries, on a world map
- Continents
- Languages
- Fastest-Growing Countries
Devices
- Devices at a Glance
- Browsers
- Operating systems
- Device types
- Screen sizes
Behaviour
- Goals, with read depth and dwell conditions
- Funnels, with the drop at each step
- Journeys, whole routes and single hops
- Retention, how a page holds its traffic
Audience
- Segments, saved filter sets
- Cohorts, groups compared on how deeply they read
Events · optional
- Clicks: outbound, downloads, email, phone, your own selectors
- Missing Pages, the 404s and what linked to them
- Site Search, what people typed into your search box
Overview, growth and data
- Overview
- Growth Tracking, the biggest movers
- Read depth and dwell time
- Weekday and hour heatmap, live visitor count
- Export: CSV, TSV, JSON or NDJSON
The interface ships translated into German, French, Spanish, Dutch and Italian, plurals
and placeholders included, with the catalogues in
.po and .mo form so a wrong word can be corrected in any editor.
New languages are welcome through
translate.wordpress.org.
Download ConvertNow Analytics
Free, and no licence key to enter. We ask a little about your site so we know who is running ConvertNow Analytics and what to build next. Nothing here is sold or passed on.
You are minutes from cookieless analytics on your own server.
Your download is starting
If the download did not start on its own, use the button above.
What to do next
- In WordPress, go to Plugins → Add New → Upload Plugin, choose the zip and install it.
- Press Activate. WordPress takes you straight to the settings screen.
- That is it. Tracking starts immediately, with nothing to paste in.
ConvertNow Analytics questions people ask first
The questions that come up most often, answered plainly. If yours is not here, email [email protected] and a person will answer.
What is cookieless analytics?
Cookieless analytics measures website traffic without storing anything on the visitor’s device. There is no cookie, no local storage and no persistent identifier.
Cookieless analytics is not a lighter kind of tracking, it is a different one. ConvertNow Analytics counts a visitor using a one-way fingerprint of their address and browser, salted with a secret that is regenerated every day, so the same person on Tuesday cannot be matched to the same person on Wednesday. Raw IP addresses are never written to your database.
Do I need a cookie banner for analytics?
A consent banner is generally required when you store or read information on a visitor’s device for a non-essential purpose. ConvertNow Analytics is cookieless analytics, so it stores nothing, which in most jurisdictions removes that basis, and it is the main reason people move to a tool like this one.
Your obligations still depend on where you and your visitors are. We are not lawyers. Confirm it with someone qualified before you take a banner down.
Is it really free, and what is the catch?
ConvertNow Analytics is free, with no card, no trial that expires, no licence key and no automatic renewal. Download it, activate it, done. The honest answer about why: it is made by ConvertNow, we run it on our own sites, and putting it in other people’s hands is how it gets better.
We may introduce paid tiers later for features that cost us money to run. The plugin you download today is yours to keep running on the terms you got it under, and since it never checks in with us, nothing we do later can switch it off.
How many sites can I install it on?
As many as you like. There is no key, so there is nothing counting installs, nothing bound to a domain and no limit on traffic. Client sites, staging copies, subdomains, a multisite network: install it wherever it is useful.
One favour: point people at the download page rather than passing the zip around, so they get the current build and whatever security fixes are in it.
Where is my data kept?
In your own WordPress database, in tables the plugin creates, on your own hosting. No pageview, no visitor and no page title is ever sent to us or to anybody else. There is no data to export back to you, because it never left.
Nothing at all touches our servers after you install it. There is no key to check and no daily call home, so once the download finishes, the connection between your site and us is over.
Will cookieless analytics slow my WordPress site down?
The tracker is about 1.5 KB and is inlined into your footer, so a measured pageview costs no extra HTTP request and nothing blocks rendering. Nothing is loaded from a CDN.
On the server side, each pageview is a single insert. Finished days are summarised overnight into small daily rows, so the dashboard reads a few hundred rows rather than millions, and a twelve month report costs the same handful of queries as a one day report.
Does cookieless analytics work with caching, or with a block theme?
Yes to both. The tracker runs in the browser, so a page served from cache is still counted. It also follows client-side navigation, which is what block themes and single-page themes do when you click a link, so those views are not lost.
If your site sits behind Cloudflare or another proxy, there is a setting for which header carries the real visitor address, and it works that out automatically by default.
How do I get updates?
Because the plugin never contacts us, it cannot notice a new version on its own. When one is worth having we email the address you gave on the download form, with a link. Installing it is the same upload as the first time: WordPress replaces the old copy and your statistics stay exactly where they are.
That email is the only reason we ask for an address. If a release fixes a security problem, it is how you find out.
What happens to my statistics if I deactivate it?
Deactivating stops the collecting and leaves everything already recorded sitting in your database. Reactivate later and the history is still there, with a gap where the plugin was off.
Deleting the plugin through WordPress removes its tables and the statistics with them, so take a database backup first if the history matters to you. We hold no copy to restore from, which is the flip side of never having had one.
Why do you ask for my details if there is no key?
Two reasons, and neither is a sales pipeline. We want to know roughly who runs ConvertNow Analytics and on what sort of site, because that decides what gets built next. And we want a way to reach you if a release turns out to have a problem.
Nothing is sold or passed on, the plugin works whether or not the details you gave were accurate, and you can ask us to delete your record at any time without it affecting your install. The Privacy Policy spells out exactly what we keep and for how long.
Support
Lost your key, or something not behaving?
Everything about your key and the cookieless analytics behind it goes to one address, answered by a person: [email protected].
Asking for a replacement key
Send it from the address the key was issued to. That is what tells us the request is yours, and it is why there is no form here. A form would let anyone have your key mailed to them.
Something like this is plenty:
We reply with a new key. The old one stops working the moment the new one exists, so update any site still running it.
- Moving to a different domain Email the old domain and the new one and we will move the key across. We do it by hand deliberately, because it is the one change that could be used to pass a key around quietly.
-
This key belongs to another site
Almost always a subdomain. A key for
example.comdoes not coverblog.example.com. Take a second key for the subdomain, free, from the form above. - The dashboard says it cannot reach us Usually the hosting account blocking outgoing requests. Your statistics keep being collected either way. Ask your host to allow outgoing HTTPS to convertnow.tools, or send us the message shown on the settings screen and we will work it out.
- Numbers look lower than another tool Usually right rather than broken. ConvertDash filters known bots and does not count them, and it counts a visit the way most tools describe but few implement. The documentation screen inside the plugin spells out what every figure means.
- Removing your details Ask and we delete your record. That withdraws the key and locks the dashboard. The statistics already in your own database are untouched.