High risk of total website crashes

Once it was a great plugin. My web agency used it for all of my customer’s websites since it was called Piwik. But within the last year several versions of Matomo crashed many of my customers websites. I totally lost faith in this plugin and cannot afford to risk that I lose customers because under the administration of my web agency their websites crash. The only thing that could reactivate the websites was deactivating Matomo by renaming the /wp-content/plugins/matomo directory and then deleting it.

Typical message from the WordPress System (in German):

“WordPress hat eine eingebaute Funktion, die erkennt, wenn ein Plugin oder ein Theme einen fatalen Fehler auf deiner Website verursacht, und dich deswegen mit dieser automatisierten E-Mail benachrichtigt. In diesem Fall hat WordPress einen Fehler in einem deiner Plugins, Matomo Analytics – Ethical Stats. Powerful Insights., abgefangen.”

Translation:

“WordPress has a built-in feature that recognises when a plugin or theme is causing a fatal error on your site and notifies you with this automated email. In this case, WordPress has caught an error in one of your plugins, Matomo Analytics – Ethical Stats. Powerful Insights, has been intercepted.”

Whoever is responsible for Matomos quality management should be replaced by someone who knows how software testing works without customers as Guinea pigs.

Another point of criticism is the bloated database space it needs, which is easily more than 100MB per year. That causes for example, that the fantastic Duplicator Backup plugin doesn’t work anymore due to its 500MB limit. So my customers had to buy the pro version of Duplicator just because Matomo wastes too much space.