Most site owners don’t need a sprawling enterprise analytics suite. They need to know how many people visited today, which pages are getting traction, where visitors are coming from, and whether the site is performing well. What they don’t need is a bloated tracking script, a cookie consent banner cluttering up their design, or their visitors’ data being shipped off to a third party.
That’s exactly why we built HDAnalytics — a lightweight, privacy-focused, cookieless analytics plugin that lives entirely inside your WordPress dashboard.
Analytics Without the Baggage
HDAnalytics was designed from the ground up around one principle: you shouldn’t have to trade your visitors’ privacy for insight into your website.
There are no cookies. No fingerprinting. No persistent user identifiers. Nothing is sent to external analytics providers, because everything is self-hosted — the data never leaves your WordPress installation. All collected data is aggregated and anonymized, meaning it can never be tied back to an individual visitor.
And because no personally identifiable information is collected or stored, sites using HDAnalytics alone for analytics typically don’t need a cookie consent banner or tracking opt-in. Your visitors get a cleaner, faster experience, and you get a dramatically simpler compliance picture under GDPR and CCPA.
What It Tracks
Despite its tiny footprint — the tracking script weighs in at just 2kb — HDAnalytics covers everything the vast majority of site owners actually use:
- Page views and users per day
- Location estimates (country-level, calculated without storing IP addresses)
- Visitor language
- Referral and UTM sources, so you know where traffic is coming from
- Page performance
- Mobile vs. desktop breakdown
- Average time on page
On top of that, HDAnalytics includes Google Search Console integration, bringing your search data into the same dashboard. Between the two, you get just about everything you need without ever leaving WordPress.
A Dashboard You’ll Actually Want to Look At
All of this data is presented in a gorgeous full-width dashboard widget, right on your WordPress admin home screen. No separate app to log into, no configuration to wrestle with — install it, activate it, and it just works.
Don’t take our word for it: you can view a live demo of the dashboard running on real data from our own site.
Built for Developers, Too
HDAnalytics is simple by default but easy to extend. Developers can:
- Send custom events to track interactions that matter to them
- Set an IP blocklist to exclude specific visitors
- Use custom filters to skip tracking events entirely — for example, ignoring views from certain countries or languages
Honest About Its Limits
We think it’s important to be upfront about what HDAnalytics deliberately doesn’t do — because most of these omissions are privacy and performance features, not oversights.
Bounce rates aren’t tracked. Bounce tracking is famously inaccurate and adds significant weight to a tracking script. Average time on page is a far better signal of how a page is performing.
City-level location isn’t available. Pinpointing a visitor’s city requires sending their IP address to a third-party service — exactly the kind of thing HDAnalytics exists to avoid. Country-level estimates, on the other hand, have proven extremely accurate in testing.
New vs. returning visitors across days can’t be measured. IP addresses are never stored; instead, daily hashed versions are used and deleted every day. That means a visitor who returns tomorrow counts as a new user — a small trade-off for the guarantee that visitor identities can never be reconstructed.
Goal and eCommerce tracking isn’t included yet, though it’s on the roadmap. In the meantime, custom event tracking covers many of the same use cases if you simply want to count how often something happens.
Get HDAnalytics
If you’ve been looking for a Google Analytics alternative that respects your visitors, keeps your site fast, and puts your data where it belongs — on your own server — HDAnalytics is for you.
HDAnalytics is available now at a special launch price of $8 (regularly $14.97). Your purchase includes a lifetime license for a single website, plus free updates and support for as long as your license is active.