Craft Analytics

Our aim was to build an analytics plugin that is lightweight, privacy-focused, and feature-rich, with GDPR compliance at the heart of its design. Craft Analytics is first-party and cookieless by default, with no added time-to-first-byte and storage that does not grow with your traffic.

Everything runs on your own server: no account, no CDN script, and no data sent anywhere.

This started life as a plugin for some of our own sites, so it's been around for a while now. Having leaned on it day to day, we decided it was worth releasing to everyone.

What it does differently

No cookies, so no banner. Visitors are counted with a hash built from a salt that is replaced every 24 hours. Nothing is stored on the device.
No IP addresses. The address is used in memory to compute the hash and then dropped. It is never written to a table, a log or a cache key.
No per-visitor records. The database holds counts, so there is nothing to hand over, delete or leak.
No effect on page speed. Capture happens after the response is flushed.
Storage that does not grow with traffic. A page viewed a million times takes the same one row as a page viewed twice. Growth is cardinality × time.
Accurate behind a cache. Blitz, Cloudflare and Varnish are all handled, with no cache configuration.
Reports built on your content model. Traffic by section, entry type and author, because Craft already knows all of that.

Requirements

Craft CMS ^5.0
PHP ^8.2
MySQL 8+ or PostgreSQL 13+
Redis recommended (session hot layer, faster unique counting), not required

Installation

composer require coyshdigital/craft-analytics
php craft plugin/install craft-analytics

Then install these cronjobs (optional but reccomended):

*/5 * * * * php craft craft-analytics/drain/run
0 4 * * *   php craft craft-analytics/gc/run

Full instructions: Installation & setup

Before you compare the numbers

Unique visitors are counted on a daily-unique basis. Somebody who visits on three days counts three times, because the hashing salt rotates every 24 hours and removes the link between their days.

How visitors are counted explains it in full.

Sources lean on the server seeing the request. The referrer is read when PHPrenders the page; the beacon deliberately never sends one, because a browser-supplied referrer is forgeable. Behind a full-page cache, sessions thatenter on a cached page are reported as Direct. Pageview counts are unaffected, and so are UTM campaigns, which travel in the URL - so behind an aggressive cache, tag the inbound links you care about.

Static & edge caching has more details.

Documentation

The full documentation lives at coysh.digital/plugins/craft-analytics/docs.

Installation & setup
How tracking works
Static & edge caching - read this if you run Blitz or a CDN
Locations & the geo database
How visitors are counted
Twig API and GraphQL API
Troubleshooting

Lite vs Pro

Lite is a usable analytics tool on its own, not a trial of Pro. Pro only gives you access to better integrations and goals/funnels.

	Lite	Pro
Pageviews, visitors, sessions, bounce rate	✅	✅
Real-time	✅	✅
Pages, sources, devices	✅	✅
Content: sections, entry types, authors	✅	✅
Crawler reporting	✅	✅
CSV & JSON export	✅	✅
Entry sidebar & dashboard widgets	✅	✅
Campaigns & attribution		✅
Geography		✅
Events, outbound clicks, downloads, scroll		✅
Goals & funnels		✅
Formie & Commerce integrations		✅
Consent-aware Tier 2		✅
Emailed summaries		✅
GraphQL API		✅