Honest Analytics

Blog

Notes on counting traffic in WordPress, written while building an analytics plugin. Mostly about why the numbers you are looking at are not the numbers you think they are.

  1. Why your analytics numbers never match

    Two analytics tools on the same site will always disagree, often by 30 per cent or more. Here is what each one is actually counting, and which number to trust for what.

  2. How page caching breaks WordPress analytics

    Turn on a caching plugin and your traffic appears to collapse overnight. The visits are still happening. Here is why the counting stops, and the three ways round it.

  3. How to remove Google Analytics from WordPress

    Removing the tracking code is the easy part. Here is the full checklist, including the consent banner, the data you should export first, and what breaks if you skip a step.

  4. How to add privacy-friendly analytics to WordPress

    What privacy-friendly actually has to mean to be worth the label, how to check a plugin against it, and how to set one up without losing the numbers you rely on.

  5. How to use analytics without cookies on WordPress

    A practical route from a cookie-based setup to a cookieless one. What to change, what to check, and what the numbers will do when you do it.

  6. What counts as a visitor in cookieless analytics?

    Nobody can count people. Every analytics tool counts a proxy for them. Here is exactly what the proxy is when there is no cookie, and what the resulting number does and does not mean.

  7. How to import GA4 data into Honest Analytics

    A step-by-step guide to bringing your Google Analytics 4 history across, including the credentials part, which is genuinely fiddly, and why the totals will not match.

  8. How to see when your WordPress website gets the most traffic

    Day and hour patterns are one of the few analytics findings you can act on immediately. Here is how to read them, and the mistakes that make people act on noise.

  9. How to track goals and funnels in WordPress

    Goals turn a raw count into a rate, and funnels show where people give up. Both are simple ideas that most analytics tools make complicated. Here is the useful version.

  10. How AI crawlers access your WordPress website

    Which AI crawlers exist, what each one is actually for, how they find your content, and what robots.txt does and does not do about it.

  11. How to see GPT and AI crawler traffic in WordPress

    How to find out how much of your traffic is AI crawlers rather than people, why most analytics tools cannot tell you, and what the number usually turns out to be.

  12. Best privacy-friendly analytics plugins for WordPress

    A straight comparison of the main options, written by someone who makes one of them. Includes the ones that are a better fit than mine, and says when.