Installation & setup

Craft Analytics needs Craft 5.0 or later and PHP 8.2 or later. It works on MySQL 8+ and PostgreSQL 13+, and it doesn't care which one you use.

Install it

From the Plugin Store, search for Craft Analytics and click install.

Or from the terminal, which is usually quicker:

composer require coyshdigital/craft-analytics
php craft plugin/install craft-analytics

That installs the plugin, and it starts counting straight away. To keep the numbers flowing efficiently, give the drain a cron entry.

Put the drain on your cron

Pageviews land in a fast spool first; the drain reads that spool and adds them into your reports. On a cron, that happens in the background:

*/5 * * * * /usr/bin/php /path/to/your/site/craft craft-analytics/drain/run

Every five minutes is a sensible default: the numbers are at most five minutes behind and each run stays small. Every minute is fine too.

While you're in there, add the housekeeping job:

0 4 * * * /usr/bin/php /path/to/your/site/craft craft-analytics/gc/run

That compacts old hourly rows into daily ones and deletes anything past your retention period. Once a day at a quiet hour is enough.

No cron? It still works.

If your host doesn't offer cron, the plugin drains itself: at most once a minute, an ordinary page request runs the drain — after the visitor already has their page, so it costs them nothing. This fallback is on by default (Settings → Craft Analytics → How data is written). It skips a spool that has grown past 2 MB, so a busy site, or one clearing a backlog, still wants a real cron entry. Leave the fallback on even with cron; it only ever fires in the gap between runs.

TIP

Not sure hits are being counted? If pageviews have arrived but nothing has drained them yet, Analytics → Dashboard says so with a "Data is waiting to be counted" notice, and tells you how to clear it.

Check it's working

1. Open your site in a browser. Not the control panel - the actual site.
2. Wait for the drain to run, or force it:

   php craft craft-analytics/drain/run

   It will tell you what it did: Drained 1 hit(s) from 1 batch(es)...
3. Go to Analytics → Real-time. You should be there.

If the drain reports 0 hits, see Troubleshooting. Testing with curl is the most common explanation.

What you get out of the box

There is nothing to configure. The defaults are:

• Hybrid tracking, the only mode that is accurate behind a cache and still counts people who block scripts.
• No cookies, local storage or device identifiers, so there is nothing to consent to.
• No IP addresses stored in a table, a log or a cache key.
• Crawlers kept out of your numbers and counted separately, so you can see what was excluded.
• 26 months of history, enough to compare this March with last March.

Where things are

Where	What
Analytics in the main nav	All the reports
Settings → Plugins → Craft Analytics	Tracking, retention, crawlers, emails
Settings → Plugins → Craft Analytics → Goals & funnels	Conversions (Pro)
Any entry's sidebar	That entry's views
Dashboard widgets	The Analytics overview and Analytics real-time widgets

Permissions

Two permissions, under Settings → Users → Permissions:

• View analytics - can see the reports. Each user sees only the sites they can edit content for, unless you also grant View all sites.
• Manage analytics settings - can create goals and funnels, and change the plugin's settings.

Upgrading to Pro

Buy Pro in the Plugin Store and the extra screens appear. Lite and Pro use the same tables, so there is no migration to run: your existing data is unchanged and the Pro reports start filling from the next drain.

Next

• How tracking works - and which mode you want
• Caching - read this if you use Blitz, Cloudflare or Varnish
• Your first goal