HDAnalytics

HDAnalytics Details

HDAnalytics is an amazingly light-weight, privacy focused, cookieless website analytics tracking plugin for WordPress. Ditch the slow and cumbersome Google Analytics to get all the data that the majority of site owners need in a beautiful and intuitive dashboard widget.

HDAnalytics tracks:

• Page views
• Users per day
• Location estimate
• Language
• Referral and UTM sources
• Page Performance
• Mobile vs desktop
• Average time on page

And also includes Google Search Console integration, so that you can get just about everything you’d need right from your WordPress dashboard.

All collected data is aggregated and cannot be tied to a single user, ensuring privacy of all of your users. No data ever leaves your site.

It is also very easy for developers to extend to do things like:

• Send custom events
• Set a blocklist of IPs
• Custom filter to not track an event (can be used to ignore views from countries, languages, etc).

HDAnalytics was designed and built from the ground up to be super lightweight on both the frontend and backend (the tracking script is only 2kb!) and to integrate perfectly into WordPress.

GDPR / CCPA Compliance

HDAnalytics is a WordPress analytics tracking platform that is fully compliant with the GDPR and CCPA standards. It is designed from the ground up with privacy as a first-class feature, allowing site owners to measure traffic and engagement without collecting personal data or relying on invasive tracking technologies.

Unlike traditional analytics platforms, HDAnalytics does not use cookies, fingerprinting, or persistent user identifiers. All analytics data is collected in an aggregated and anonymized form, ensuring that individual visitors cannot be identified, tracked across sessions, or profiled. Because no personally identifiable information (PII) is processed or stored, HDAnalytics operates outside the scope of consent-based tracking requirements in most jurisdictions.

HDAnalytics also avoids storing IP addresses, user agents tied to individuals, or cross-site identifiers. Traffic data remains self-hosted within your WordPress installation, meaning no data is shared with third-party analytics providers or external services. This significantly reduces data exposure risk and simplifies compliance obligations for site owners.

As a result, websites that only use HDAnalytics typically do not require cookie consent banners or tracking opt-ins for analytics purposes alone. This improves user experience while maintaining compliance with modern privacy regulations, including GDPR (EU) and CCPA (California).

HDAnalytics is an ideal analytics solution for organizations, businesses, and individuals who want meaningful insights into their website traffic while respecting user privacy and adhering to global data protection standards.

This section is intended to provide general information on data privacy practices and does not constitute legal advice. Compliance with GDPR, CCPA, and other privacy laws depends on your full website configuration and practices.

What HDAnalytics Can’t Do

Bounces

Tracking bounce rates is not only notoriously inaccurate, but it also adds a lot of “weight” and “size” to the tracking script. This is why it is recommended to use the average time on page metric to gauge how well a particular page is performing instead of bounce rate.

Custom “Goals” and or eCommerce tracking

Although this is something I will be adding in at some point, Google Analytics-like goal tracking is not a part of HDAnalytics. However, for most people, the custom event tracking can be used as a partial replacement if you just want to know how many times an event has triggered. It is strongly recommended to view the Demo.

*Accurate* Location

Getting accurate location data down to the city not only requires using the user’s IP address, but would also involve sending that IP address to a third party in order to get location data. This not only goes against the privacy focused approach of HDAnalytics, but it would also slow things down as we’d need to wait for that third-party to respond with a location before being able to save the event. With that said, the methods used to get a user’s country has been extremely accurate across all of my testing.

Read the documentation for more information on how user location is calculated.

Track user across days (new vs returning users)

Due to the privacy focus, IPs are never stored, instead using daily hashed versions which are deleted every day. This ensures that the IPs are never actually stored and can never be retrieved. This also means that users are not tracked across days. If a user visits your site 4 times today, that will count as a single user. But if they come back tomorrow, they will be counted as a brand-new user.