Description
Nodium is simple, private website analytics for your own site. This plugin adds Nodium to WordPress.
- Analytics on every page: paste your Nodium key, and Nodium counts visits on every page of your site. It sets no cookies and stores nothing in your visitors’ browsers.
- Visitors with ad blockers count too: some ad blockers stop analytics scripts by their address. With the proxy on (the default), the plugin serves Nodium’s script from your own site and passes its events on to Nodium from your server, so those visits are counted. Browsers that ask not to be tracked (Do Not Track or Global Privacy Control) still aren’t.
- Your own forms, read field by field: the script notices when someone starts and sends a form on your site and which field they stopped at. It reads only whether a field is empty, never what anyone types. Password, hidden, payment and file fields are skipped.
- It skips you: while you’re signed in as an administrator, the script isn’t loaded, so your own visits aren’t counted.
You set up your site and read your numbers at usenodium.com. Nodium is a paid service with a 30-day trial and no card; its plans are on usenodium.com/pricing.
External services
This plugin connects to Nodium (https://usenodium.com), the service that counts your visits. Without it, nothing is counted. Without a Nodium key in Settings Nodium, the plugin loads and sends nothing.
- The analytics script, https://cdn.usenodium.com/n.js. With the proxy on, your server fetches it at most once a day and serves it from your site. With the proxy off, visitors’ browsers load it from cdn.usenodium.com. Not loaded for signed-in administrators.
- Each visit’s events, https://cdn.usenodium.com/api/v. The script sends each page’s address (without its query string, except utm and ref or source tags), the referring site’s name, taps on phone, email and map links, clicks on links to other sites and to files, pages answered as not found, events you set up, how long the page was on screen and how far it was scrolled, and, for the forms on the page, which form and field was started or left and whether it was sent, never what was typed. With the proxy on, your server passes each event on with the visitor’s IP address (signed with your key) and browser description; with it off, the browser sends it directly. Nodium uses the address only to tell visitors apart for the day and to find their country, region and city, and stores neither the address nor the browser description: it keeps whether the device is a phone, tablet or computer and the browser’s and system’s names. It sends nothing when the browser asks not to be tracked (Do Not Track or Global Privacy Control).
Nodium’s terms of service and privacy policy.
Installation
- Install Nodium Analytics from Plugins Add New Plugin, or upload the zip, and activate it.
- In Nodium, open Settings Site Proxy and copy your Nodium key. In WordPress, paste it into Settings Nodium Nodium key, and save.
- If you added Nodium’s snippet another way (a header-code plugin, your theme), remove it there: the plugin adds the script itself.
- Visit your site while signed out (or in a private window). Nodium shows when the first visit arrives.
FAQ
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Why don’t my own visits show up?
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The script isn’t loaded for signed-in administrators, so the numbers are your visitors’, not yours.
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What does the proxy do?
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It serves Nodium’s script from your site’s own address and passes each event on to Nodium from your server, adding the visitor’s IP address signed with your key. Nodium uses that address only to tell visitors apart for the day and to find their country, region and city, as it would for a visit that reached it directly, and never stores it. You can turn the proxy off in Settings Nodium; the script then loads from cdn.usenodium.com.
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Does the proxy need the REST API?
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Yes: it serves the script and takes the events through two routes of WordPress’s REST API, under eight random letters. If a security plugin blocks the REST API for visitors who aren’t signed in, allow those routes there, or turn the proxy off in Settings Nodium.
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Which visitor address does the proxy send?
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The address your server sees. Behind Cloudflare it uses CF-Connecting-IP, and behind another proxy or load balancer the last public address in X-Forwarded-For, which is the one your own proxy added. If your host sets a header with the real visitor address, name it in wp-config.php, above the line that says to stop editing:
define( 'NODIUM_IP_HEADER', 'HTTP_X_REAL_IP' );Use a header only if your host’s proxy sets it itself and overwrites any copy a visitor sends.
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What does the plugin store?
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Your Nodium key, whether the proxy is on, the proxy’s random path, and a copy of Nodium’s script (refreshed daily). To keep one visitor from flooding the proxy it also keeps, for under a minute, a count named for a salted hash of the visitor’s address, never the address. Deleting the plugin removes the rest. Your numbers live in Nodium.
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No. The plugin and Nodium’s script set no cookies, and the script stores nothing in the browser.
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Does it read what people type into my forms?
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No. For each field the script reads only whether it is empty, and skips password, hidden, payment and file fields. It never reads or sends what anyone types.
Reviews
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Contributors & Developers
“Nodium Analytics” is open source software. The following people have contributed to this plugin.
Contributors
Translate “Nodium Analytics” into your language.
Interested in development?
Browse the code, check out the SVN repository, or subscribe to the development log by RSS.
Changelog
1.0.0
- Nodium’s analytics on every page once a Nodium key is set, skipping signed-in administrators.
- The proxy: the script served from your own site and its events passed on from your server, so visitors whose ad blockers stop analytics scripts are counted too. On by default.