Description
Traffalyzer connects this website with its account on traffalyzer.com and brings the outside view into WordPress. Other SEO plugins check what is in the form. This plugin shows what actually happens out there.
Reports in the admin area (menu Traffalyzer):
- Overview: site score, last scan, what comes next and a technical quick check of robots.txt, the sitemap and llms.txt.
- Findings: everything the crawler found, with an edit link for every affected page.
- Growth plan: the steps Traffalyzer suggests; tick them off on paid plans.
- Search queries: strongest queries, opportunities (position 5–20), winners and losers.
- Pages: clicks, impressions, position and open findings for every page, plus the view Needs a refresh: pages that lost at least 20 % of their clicks and have not been changed for twelve months.
- Broken addresses: addresses that returned an error in the last scan, with the pages that link to them and a suggested redirect. With the Redirection plugin or the Rank Math redirections module the redirect is created right there.
In the editor (block editor sidebar, or a meta box in the classic editor): findings for this page, clicks and position, the real search queries, live-checked against your text as you type, pages worth linking to, pages that compete for the same query, the search performance chart with your revisions as markers, and a verdict whether your last change made a difference. The sidebar loads in the background; nobody waits for Traffalyzer when opening the editor.
Also: Traffalyzer columns in the post lists (sortable), a dashboard widget, an admin bar item with the number of important findings, checks in Tools Site Health, WP-CLI commands and an optional /llms.txt generated from your published content.
The inventory. WordPress tells Traffalyzer which addresses exist, whether they are published and indexable (including noindex from Yoast SEO, Rank Math, SEOPress and All in One SEO), which canonical you set deliberately, the content type and when a page was changed. Traffalyzer uses this for findings no crawler can make on its own: unpublished content that is still reachable or still in Google, published pages nothing links to, and canonicals that differ from what WordPress intends. Changes are collected when you save and sent in the background; a complete sync runs once a week.
What the plugin deliberately does not do: start a scan when you save. A crawl takes minutes and uses quota. There is a button for that.
Staging and local copies
Reports and the editor sidebar work on staging and local copies too: addresses are rewritten to the domain Traffalyzer knows. The inventory, however, is only sent from the live site, because a copy would report content the live site does not have.
Free and paid
The Traffalyzer service can be used for free. Some functions depend on the paid Traffalyzer plan (the details of the growth plan steps and ticking them off); the plugin itself locks nothing.
External services
This plugin connects to Traffalyzer (traffalyzer.com), a service run by kommune3 (Germany) that analyses the search performance of websites. It is used to show the reports, the editor sidebar and the metrics of this website in WordPress. Nothing is sent before you connect the website.
What is sent, and when:
- When connecting (your browser, on traffalyzer.com): the address of the homepage, the return address in the admin area and one-time values of the connection. You sign in on traffalyzer.com yourself.
- When connecting (this server, to traffalyzer.com/api/v1): a one-time code and its verifier, in exchange for the key.
- Every request to traffalyzer.com/api/v1 carries the key of this website, the language of the current user (
lang=deoren, so texts come back in that language) and a User-Agent with the plugin version and the address of the homepage. - Reports, editor sidebar, dashboard widget (when someone opens them): the address or path of the requested page and the time window.
- Daily background task: the domain profile and the metrics of all pages are fetched (no data is sent apart from the key).
- Site Health (Tools Site Health, and WordPress’ own weekly background check): the key is checked with one request for the domain profile.
- Inventory (background task, button or WP-CLI, only from the live site): per post the address, a deliberately set canonical, published/indexable, the content type, the internal ID (e.g.
post/12) and the date of the last change. - Edit dates (background task, can be switched off): the page address, the time of the edit and the revision ID.
- Scan button: only the request to start a scan.
- Growth plan, ticking off a step (paid plan): the key of the step and whether it is done or open again.
- Disconnecting, reconnecting and uninstalling: the stored key (on reconnecting: the previous key) is sent to Traffalyzer to revoke it.
Not sent: content, titles, names, e-mail addresses or IDs of editors, anything about visitors. The plugin sets no cookies and adds no scripts to the public website.
- Privacy policy: https://traffalyzer.com/en/privacy
- Terms of use: https://traffalyzer.com/en/terms
- Legal notice: https://traffalyzer.com/en/imprint
Source code and build
The admin and editor scripts in build/ are compiled from the readable sources in src/, which ship with the plugin together with package.json, package-lock.json and webpack.config.js. To build them yourself you need Node.js 20.19 or newer (22 recommended):
npm ci && npm run build
PHP needs no build step. Translations: npm run i18n:pot creates languages/traffalyzer.pot.
Screenshots
Installation
- Install and activate the plugin.
- Go to Traffalyzer Settings and click Connect with Traffalyzer. Sign in (or create a free account), choose the domain of this website and confirm. You are sent back and the key is stored automatically; you never have to copy it.
- Send the inventory once when asked (or later under Settings Content).
- Optional: under Settings Access, choose which roles see the reports (default: editors) and who may start a scan.
Connecting needs HTTPS in the admin area (local hosts such as *.test or localhost excepted). Without it, create a key in Traffalyzer under Domain Integrations Plugins & API access and enter it under Enter the key manually.
Key in wp-config.php. Instead of the database you can set the key as a constant: define( 'TRAFFALYZER_API_KEY', 'tfz_…' ); or as the environment variable TRAFFALYZER_API_KEY. Both take precedence over the stored key. In a multisite network the constant applies to the main site; further sites can use define( 'TRAFFALYZER_API_KEYS', array( 'blog.example.com' => 'tfz_…' ) );.
FAQ
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Does the plugin slow down my website?
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No. Nothing runs on the public website except the optional
/llms.txt. In the admin area, reports load in the background, responses are cached for ten minutes and metrics are fetched once a day. -
How much of the API quota does it use?
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Traffalyzer allows 200 API calls a day on free domains and 2,000 on paid ones. Thanks to the cache, an editorial team working all day stays far below that. Pages, columns and the dashboard widget read local data and cost no quota at all.
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How do I revoke the key?
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Disconnect in the settings revokes the key of this website in Traffalyzer. Uninstalling the plugin does the same. You can also revoke keys any time on traffalyzer.com under Domain Integrations.
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Why is the inventory not sent from my staging site?
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Because a copy of the website has its own database: drafts, test content, deleted pages. Traffalyzer would compare the live site with a database that is not its own. If the site under another host name really is the live site, confirm it under Settings Content Live site.
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Is llms.txt switched on automatically?
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No. It is off by default. If a file
llms.txtalready exists in the web root or another plugin serves one, the settings say so. -
Can I adjust what is reported?
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Yes, with the filter
traffalyzer_inventory_entry($entry,$post), which runs last for every entry.traffalyzer_post_typeslimits the content types. -
Which WP-CLI commands are there?
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wp traffalyzer status,
wp traffalyzer inventory [--dry-run] [--allow-foreign-host],wp traffalyzer scan [--wait],wp traffalyzer metrics,wp traffalyzer queue,wp traffalyzer cache clear,wp traffalyzer llms-txtandwp traffalyzer key set --stdin/key delete. -
Multilingual sites (Polylang, WPML)?
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Every translation is a post of its own with its own address, and the inventory, the columns and the editor sidebar use exactly that address, including the language directory (e.g.
/en/contact/). The homepage is reported once as/; with a static front page per language, the translated front pages are reported under their own addresses. Traffalyzer scans the domain across all languages. -
Multisite?
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Every site is its own connection with its own key and settings. In subdirectory networks all sites share one domain, so the inventory of a site never removes entries of the others, llms.txt is only served by the main site, and at most five sites can be connected (Traffalyzer allows five keys per domain).
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Contributors & Developers
“Traffalyzer” is open source software. The following people have contributed to this plugin.
Contributors
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Changelog
1.0.0
- First release.