GNS Page and Site Tracker

Description

Most traffic tools are written for engineers. This one is written for the rest of us. Easy as pie.

Click “Start tracking,” and Tracker begins counting Pages Seen and link clicks on your site right away. No Google account or complicated setup is needed, and your numbers stay in your own WordPress database.

Tracker starts fresh the day you turn it on and grows with your site. Some cards are ready right away; others fill in after a week or two, and the dashboard tells you when.

Six cards, readable at a glance

• Pages Seen. How many times people looked at your pages during the dates you picked.
• Most Visited Page. The page people looked at most.
• Link Clicks. How many times people clicked links in your pages (menu clicks not included).
• Mobile vs. Desktop. Whether people visited on a phone or tablet, or on a computer.
• Busiest Day. The day of the week your pages are seen most.
• Trending Page. The page getting more attention now than it did the week before.

Lists below the cards

• Focus Page. Pick one page and check on it each time you visit. Tracker compares it with the period before.
• Most Visited Pages. Every counted page, ranked by Pages Seen.
• Link Tracker. Which links people clicked, and how many times. Menu clicks are marked.
• Pages with Amazon Links. Pages whose content links to Amazon, ranked by Amazon link clicks.
• New Content Check. Pages and posts published in the last 30 days, with Pages Seen since each went up.
• Quiet Pages. Pages nobody looked at during the dates you picked.

One date control sets the dates for the main cards and lists; Focus Page has its own date selection. Each admin’s choices are remembered. If the dates you pick start before Tracker began counting, the dashboard says which days the numbers cover. Long lists show 10 rows at a time, with a search box and Previous and Next buttons.

Tracker Glossary

Every card and list has an info icon with a one-sentence explanation, and a book icon that opens a fuller explanation in the Tracker Glossary at the bottom of the dashboard. No jargon to decode.

What it does not count

• Visits while you or another user are signed in to WordPress.
• Known bots and crawlers, such as search engine bots. Tracker checks each visit against the open-source isbot list before anything is counted. No bot filter is perfect, so bots that pretend to be people may still be counted.

Privacy

Tracker stores aggregated daily counts for pages seen and link clicks, including the page, the link clicked (without anything after a “?” in the address), whether the link was in a menu, the date, and a general device type (phone, tablet, computer, or unknown). It does not create individual visitor histories.

It does not store IP addresses, names, or email addresses. It does not set cookies or track individual visitors from page to page. All counts stay in your own WordPress database. Tracker does not send your data anywhere and does not contact Google or any other outside service.

To skip known bots, Tracker checks the visitor’s browser identification against the isbot list. This check runs in the visitor’s browser, and nothing about it is stored or sent anywhere.

Tracker also remembers each signed-in admin’s own dashboard choices, such as the dates they picked and their focus page. These are settings for the dashboard, not information about visitors.

You may still want to mention in your site’s privacy policy that you count page visits and link clicks.

Credits

Known-bot detection uses isbot by Omri Lotan (https://github.com/omrilotan/isbot), released under the Unlicense. A copy of its license is included in the vendor folder.