Free WordPress analytics that counts real visitors, not bots
60+ report screens inside wp‑admin, every figure in your own database. No cookie, no consent banner, no third party. It also answers the one question most analytics tools cannot: which of your writers earns traffic.
- 60+ report screens
- ~1.5 KB on your pages
- No banner, no account
Free WordPress analytics running in about two minutes
No script to paste into your theme, no account to create, no dashboard on somebody else's server. Install, activate, and your free WordPress analytics shows up next to everything else you manage.
Install it
In WordPress go to Plugins, Add New, search for ConvertNow Analytics and press Install. Prefer the zip? There is a direct download further down this page.
Activate it
Activating is the whole of the setup. WordPress takes you straight to the settings screen, and there is nothing you have to change there.
Watch it fill in
Visits appear within seconds, with no banner to accept first. Yesterday is summarised overnight, so a twelve month view loads as fast as a one day view.
What you actually get from free WordPress analytics
Not a data warehouse and not a funnel builder. The questions a site owner asks on a Monday morning, answered by free WordPress analytics the moment you activate the plugin.
It tells you who wrote what they read
Most tools tell you how many people visited. If you run a magazine, a multi author blog 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.
Real numbers, not estimates
Visitors, visits, views, views per visit, bounce rate and time on page, all counted directly. Bounce rate means what everyone means by it: a visit that saw exactly one page. Time on page comes from an engagement beacon and counts only while the tab is actually visible.
Goals, funnels and journeys
Mark a page as a result, optionally only when somebody read far enough or stayed long enough. Build an ordered funnel and see the drop at every step. Journeys show the routes people actually take. Each one is created on the screen that shows it, in about fifteen seconds.
Cookieless 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.
Country data without an outside lookup
Geography is the part most privacy tools get wrong, because the usual fix is a third party 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 and leaves no server. Country data by DB‑IP under CC BY 4.0.
Built to stay light
The tracker is inlined into your footer and sent with the browser's own Beacon API, so a measured pageview costs no extra request and about 1.5 KB over the wire. Raw hits are summarised hourly. Every chart is hand drawn SVG: no charting library, no mapping library.
The screen nobody else ships
Every pageview carries its author, so ranking your writers is a menu item rather than a spreadsheet afternoon. Fastest Growing Authors measures each one against the previous period of the same length, which is how you spot a byline climbing before it peaks.
Blog Posts sits on its own, so the home page and category archives stop drowning out the writing.
Free WordPress analytics: ten groups of screens, none held back
Every group in this free WordPress analytics plugin opens with an at a glance summary, then the individual reports underneath. Each one opens in place rather than loading a new admin page, and every chart exports as a PNG or JPG from its own header. There is no paid tier to hold anything back for.
10+ menu groups
Scroll for the restAI
AI at a Glance, AI Traffic, AI Referrals, AI Crawlers, AI Visibility
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 Engines, Social Media, Fastest Growing Referrers, Last 7 Days, Channels, All Referrers
Campaigns
Campaigns at a Glance, UTM Sources, Mediums and 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, Retention
Audience
Segments as saved filter sets, Cohorts compared on how deeply they read
Events · optional
Clicks on outbound links, downloads, email and phone or your own selectors, Missing Pages, Site Search
Overview and data
Overview, Growth Tracking, read depth and dwell time, weekday and hour heatmap, live visitor count, export to CSV, TSV, JSON or NDJSON
Have a look around
Click any screen to open it full sizeThe interface ships in German, French, Spanish, Dutch and Italian, plurals and placeholders included. New languages are welcome through translate.wordpress.org.
Free WordPress analytics against Google Analytics 4
GA4 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. Here is the honest difference between GA4 and free WordPress analytics, including where we give 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 |
| Where you read it | Inside wp‑admin | A separate product to log into |
| Data retention | You choose, forever if you like | 14 months by default for event data |
| Sampling | Never | Applied on large or complex queries |
| 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 |
| Raw data out | CSV, TSV, JSON or NDJSON, any period | BigQuery export |
| Returning visitors across days | Cannot be measured, by design | Measured |
| Ads and conversion integration | None | Native to Google Ads |
| Cost | Free, GPLv2 or later | Free, with paid 360 tier |
The last two rows go the other way on purpose. A visitor hash that is re-salted every day cannot follow anybody into next week, so weekly 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. Written in good faith in 2026, and we are not lawyers.
Install ConvertNow Analytics, the free WordPress analytics plugin
Free WordPress analytics, GPL licensed, no card and no account. The easiest route is straight from your own WordPress admin.
From WordPress.org
Updates arrive in your dashboard like any other plugin, and WordPress verifies the download for you.
- Plugins, then Add New Plugin.
- Search for ConvertNow Analytics.
- Install, then Activate. That is it.
Prefer the zip?
Upload it under Plugins, Add New Plugin, Upload Plugin. Same build, same licence.
Latest build
Tell us where you are running it, and we will email you when it updates
If it did not start on its own, use the button above.
Questions people ask first
If yours is not here, email [email protected] and a person will answer.
What is cookieless analytics?
It measures traffic without storing anything on the visitor's device. No cookie, no local storage, no persistent identifier.
It is not a lighter kind of tracking, it is a different one. A visitor is counted with a one way hash of their address and browser, salted with a secret that regenerates 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 still need a cookie banner?
A banner is generally required when you store or read information on a visitor's device for a non essential purpose. This plugin stores nothing, which in most jurisdictions removes that basis, and it is the main reason people switch.
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?
It is on WordPress.org under GPLv2 or later. No card, no trial that expires, no licence key, no automatic renewal. The honest reason: we built it for our own sites, and putting it in other people's hands is how it gets better.
We may add paid tiers later for features that cost us money to run. The plugin you install today keeps working 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. Nothing counts installs, nothing is bound to a domain, and there is no traffic limit. Client sites, staging copies, subdomains, a multisite network: install it wherever it is useful.
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.
No visitor data ever leaves your server. The only outbound requests come from optional helpers (site icons, the iCloud Private Relay list, alert webhooks and opt-in usage stats), and only when you switch them on. There is nothing for us to export back to you, because it never left.
Will it slow my site down?
The tracker is about 1.5 KB, inlined into your footer, so a measured pageview costs no extra HTTP request and nothing blocks rendering. Nothing loads from a CDN.
On the server, 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.
Does it 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 follows client side navigation too, which is what block themes do when you click a link, so those views are not lost.
Behind Cloudflare or another proxy, there is a setting for which header carries the real visitor address. It works that out automatically by default.
What happens to my statistics if I deactivate it?
Deactivating stops the collecting and leaves everything already recorded in your database. Reactivate later and the history is still there, with a gap where the plugin was off.
Deleting the plugin removes its tables and the statistics with them, so take a backup first if the history matters. We hold no copy to restore from, which is the flip side of never having had one.
Your numbers, on your server, tonight
Install it, activate it, and watch the first visits land. Nothing to configure, nothing to pay, nothing leaving your site.