ClearStat – Privacy-Friendly Local Analytics

1. 01Install and activate ClearStat – Privacy-Friendly Local Analytics .
2. 02Open ClearStat > Settings and complete the four-step setup.
3. 03Choose the privacy mode appropriate for your site.
4. 04Review exclusions and retention, then save the configuration.
5. 05Visit a public, non-excluded page and confirm the first view under ClearStat > Data Health .

If a page cache or CDN serves old HTML after a tracking-setting change, purge that cache once.

Does ClearStat require Google Analytics or an external account?

No. ClearStat Free collects, stores, aggregates, and reports analytics inside your WordPress installation. No ClearStat account is required.

Where is the analytics data stored?

Analytics is stored in dedicated tables in your WordPress database. Free sends no analytics, configuration, or product telemetry to ClearStat or WPGeared.

Does ClearStat use cookies?

Strict mode uses no cookies or persistent visitor identifiers. Consent-aware continuity can issue a random 30-day first-party HttpOnly cookie only after an affirmative supported consent signal.

Does ClearStat store IP addresses or fingerprint visitors?

No raw IP address or full User-Agent is stored in analytics tables. ClearStat does not fingerprint visitors. A short-lived abuse-control key may be derived server-side without retaining the raw address.

Why are Visitors or Visits unavailable in Strict mode?

Strict mode deliberately cannot link activity into visitor or visit estimates. ClearStat shows continuity-dependent metrics as unavailable rather than inventing numbers.

Which activity can ClearStat track automatically?

Free supports page views, outbound clicks, downloads, email and phone clicks, searches, 404 views, and supported basic form completions.

Can I export or delete my data?

Yes. Report tables can be exported as bounded CSV files. Data Management provides retention controls, date-range purge, delete-all, and an explicit delete-on-uninstall choice.

Will ClearStat slow down the public site?

The small dependency-free tracker is deferred and sends a first-party asynchronous request. Reporting and aggregation run separately from page rendering. Performance still depends on hosting, traffic, caching, and other plugins.

Does ClearStat guarantee GDPR, ePrivacy, or CCPA compliance?

No. ClearStat is built to support responsible privacy work, but compliance depends on the site’s jurisdiction, purposes, configuration, notices, consent tools, legal basis, and other software.

What are the current limitations?

Geography is currently disabled. Search activity uses a separate internal marker path; other plain-permalink content URLs can still aggregate under / when WordPress cannot resolve them in strict query-free mode. Security or caching layers must allow anonymous POST requests to /metricpress/v1/collect . Strict Content Security Policy deployments may require a nonce or hash for the inline tracker configuration.

ClearStat requires WordPress 6.4+, PHP 7.4+, InnoDB, and utf8mb4 on MySQL 5.7+ or MariaDB 10.4+. A maintained database release is recommended for production.