Shrikant Visitor Tracker

Try it now, without installing anything — opens a throwaway WordPress in your browser with the plugin already running. Nothing is installed on your own site.

Most analytics plugins assume you are starting from nothing. This one assumes you are not.

Switching counters without losing the history

If you run Post Views Counter or WP-PostViews, deleting it throws away every number it ever recorded. The Import screen reads those totals across first — reading only, never writing to or removing anything in them — so you can switch and keep the figures.

Imported counts are then kept separate and labelled, never merged into this plugin’s own statistics. The two measure different things: one spans years under its own rules, the other starts the day you switch this on and leaves out the bots it recognises. Adding them together would produce a number that means nothing in particular. So a reader sees the two added up and no post appears to lose its history, while the dashboard shows only what was actually tracked and stays comparable with itself.

Post Views Counter and WP-PostViews are separate projects by their own authors. They are named here only so their data can be read; this plugin is not affiliated with or endorsed by them.

Nothing is deleted unless you ask

Deleting this plugin does not delete its data, unless you switch that on in Settings. Replacing a hand-installed copy with the directory one goes through the same Delete button as saying goodbye to it, and that should not cost you six months of history.

The hourly summaries every report is built from are never deleted at all, by anything. Individual visit rows are kept for good too, unless you choose a retention period yourself.

Why these numbers are lower than your old counter’s

Most view counters add up in PHP while the page is being built. On a site with a page cache that means the readers served from cache are never counted at all, while the crawlers that bypass the cache are counted every time — so the number drifts away from reality in both directions at once.

This one counts from the browser, after the page has loaded, and filters known bots before recording anything. Expect its figures to sit closer to what Search Console reports than to a counter that has been accumulating for years under different rules.

Everything else

Shrikant Visitor Tracker gives you complete control over your visitor analytics data — everything is stored in your own database, nothing leaves your server (except a geo-IP lookup to the free ipwho.is API, which is cached for at least 24 hours).

Key Features

• Total / daily / weekly / monthly / yearly visitors with page-level tracking
• Device, browser, and OS detection via lightweight User-Agent parsing (no library)
• Referrer categorisation (direct, search, social, other) + full UTM parameter tracking
• Country detection, off by default — turn it on and the anonymised IP (never the full one) goes to ipwho.is for a country code, cached 24h. This is the only outside request the plugin can make
• Real-time “currently online” counter using WordPress transients
• Counts correctly behind a page cache — a non-blocking browser beacon, not a PHP counter, so WP Rocket, LiteSpeed, W3 Total Cache and Cloudflare do not hide your readers
• Pre-aggregated summary table — every report is built from hourly summaries, so a report stays fast whatever the traffic, and the summaries are kept for good
• Bot filtering — user-agent matching against a maintained list, plus proxy and prefetch headers, before anything is recorded
• Privacy-first — IP anonymisation, DNT header respect, cookie consent hook, GDPR data export/erasure
• REST API — full stats API under /wp-json/shrikant-vt/v1/ for headless or custom integrations
• WP-CLI commands — wp shrikant-vt stats today, wp shrikant-vt export, wp shrikant-vt cleanup --dry-run, and more
• Import from Post Views Counter or WP-PostViews — switch without losing the history
• Any date range — the usual 7/30/90-day presets, or two dates of your own
• Searchable, sortable, paginated reports with CSV export
• Choose where the count appears — a checkbox per public post type, not just posts
• Nothing is ever deleted unless you ask for it — not on uninstall, not on a schedule
• Zero paid dependencies — 100% free and open source, nothing loaded from a CDN

Third-party code

This plugin bundles Chart.js 4.5.1 (https://www.chartjs.org), used to draw the
dashboard charts. Chart.js is released under the MIT licence, which is
compatible with the GPL, and its source is at https://github.com/chartjs/Chart.js.
It is bundled rather than loaded from a CDN because a plugin in this directory
may not load code from elsewhere at run time. Nothing else is bundled, and no
other third-party code is loaded.

Privacy & GDPR

• Raw IP addresses are never stored
• With IP anonymisation enabled (default), the last IPv4 octet is zeroed before any geo lookup
• Visitor IDs are HMAC-SHA256 hashes that rotate daily — they cannot be reversed to identify real people
• DNT header is respected by default
• Integrates with any cookie consent plugin via the shrikant_vt_has_consent filter
• Compatible with WordPress’s built-in personal data export/erasure tools

Developer Hooks

• shrikant_vt_before_track_visit — modify or abort tracking
• shrikant_vt_after_insert — react to new visit rows
• shrikant_vt_has_consent — integrate cookie consent plugins
• shrikant_vt_is_bot — override bot detection
• shrikant_vt_get_stats — filter any stats result
• shrikant_vt_default_settings — add custom settings