The control panel

Analytics lives under Analytics in the CP nav: Dashboard, Real-time, Pages, Sources, Devices.

Screens

Dashboard - headline numbers (pageviews, unique visitors, sessions, bounce rate, average session) each compared against the previous period of the same length, a traffic chart, and the top of each report. A live banner at the top shows how many visitors are on the site right now, updating every 15 seconds, and links through to the Real-time screen.

Real-time - visitors active inside the session window, read entirely from the session cache. No database queries at all, which is a pleasant side-effect of keeping sessions in the hot layer. Refreshes every 15 seconds, and stops polling when the tab is hidden.

Pages - views, entrances, exits, bounce rate and average time per page. Each path links to its own screen (below); where the path matched a Craft entry, an edit link sits beside it. Tick up to four rows and press Compare selected to plot them against each other over time — the comparison lives in the URL, so it can be bookmarked or sent to someone.

A single page - reached by clicking any path. Views and unique visitors over time, the headline numbers with period-on-period change, how people reached this page, how far down they read, and the events and outbound clicks recorded on it. Works for paths that are not Craft entries at all: a template-only route, a search results page, a URL that only ever 404'd.

Two figures on that screen need reading carefully. Entrances counts sessions that began on this page, so a page people reach part-way through a visit will show few — that is the page's role, not a fault. Bounce rate is derived from entrances for the same reason, and shows - when there are none: a bounce is only ever counted against the page a session entered on.

How people reached this page fills forward only. It is derived from the raw hits, which are aggregated away as they arrive, so it cannot be worked out retrospectively — the card states the date collection began. The referrer recorded is the one the session arrived by, not the previous page on your own site, so an interior page reports how the visit started.

Sources - sessions by channel (direct / search / social / referral / campaign / internal) and by referring host, with a stacked chart of how that mix moved over the period. Only the host is ever stored, never the full referrer URL, which can carry search terms.

Devices - device type, browser and operating system, with the device split as a doughnut.

Choosing a period

Every report screen carries the same picker: today, yesterday, the last 7, 30 or 90 days, the last 12 months, and Custom for an absolute window. Whatever you pick follows you across site switches, drill-downs, the Pages filters and the CSV export, and it lives in the URL, so a particular window is a link you can bookmark or send to someone.

A custom window can span at most 400 days. That is a little more than the 12 months the picker already offers, and the cap is there because unique visitors are counted per day - a range is one query per day in it, so an unbounded one is an unbounded amount of work. Dates in the future are pulled back to today, and dates entered the wrong way round are swapped rather than rejected.

One thing worth knowing: a single day only gets an hour-by-hour chart while it is still inside the hourly retention window (below). Ask for one day from three months ago and you get a single daily figure, because the hourly rows for that day were compacted away and drawing 24 zeroes would look like an outage rather than like housekeeping.

When people visit

The dashboard's heatmap plots day of the week against hour of the day. It covers the hourly retention window only — hourlyWindowDays, seven days by default — and says so on the card, because that is the period still held hour by hour. Older days are compacted to a single daily total to keep the tables proportional to cardinality rather than traffic, which leaves nothing to put on an hourly axis. Raise hourlyWindowDays for a longer heatmap, at 24 times the rows for the extra window.

Charts and accessibility

Charts are drawn with Chart.js, vendored locally — there is no CDN request and nothing loads from outside your server. It is registered only on the screens that draw one; Craft's own entry editor and dashboard widgets use server-rendered SVG sparklines and download no JavaScript from this plugin.

Every chart ships a table of the same numbers, hidden from view but present for a screen reader, and each series is named in the legend and in its tooltip — so nothing is ever identified by colour alone. If a chart cannot be drawn, that table becomes visible: a failure shows you the figures rather than an apology. Animation is disabled when the operating system asks for reduced motion.

Where the content is

Two things a generic analytics tool structurally cannot do, because it has no idea what an entry is:

• Entry editor sidebar - views, visitors and a 30-day sparkline for that entry, in the entry itself.
• “Views (30d)” column on the entries index. Craft only shows table columns a user has selected, so turn it on via View → Table columns.

Dashboard widgets

Two widgets for Craft's own dashboard, both under the View analytics permission and both scoped to the currently selected site:

• Analytics - a compact overview: a row of headline figures, a views sparkline and a link into the full report. Its settings let you choose the period (today through the last 12 months) and which figures to show. Any of views, visitors, sessions, bounce rate, pages per session, average session and average time on page can be turned on; it ships showing views, visitors and bounce rate.
• Analytics real-time - visitors on the site right now and the pages they're on, read entirely from the session cache and refreshed every 15 seconds. The same live figure the Real-time screen shows, on your dashboard.

Export

Every report exports to CSV, and to JSON with ?format=json. Exports carry exact values - the screens abbreviate (13k) for readability, files are for working with. The JSON payload states uniquesAccuracy so a consumer cannot mistake an estimate for a count.

Requires the Export analytics data permission.

Permissions

Permission	Grants
View analytics	The Analytics screens, limited to sites the user can edit
↳ View analytics for all sites	Every site's traffic, regardless of content permissions
↳ Export analytics data	The export endpoints
Manage plugin settings	The settings screen

Site scoping is enforced in the controller, not just hidden in the UI: a user who can only edit one site's content cannot read another site's traffic by editing a URL (C8).

About the numbers

• Unique visitors is an estimate, and the CP says by how much (±1.6% by default; ±0.8% with Redis or a higher hllPrecision; exact with the exact driver). It is never presented as a count.
• Multi-day uniques are on a daily-unique basis. The visitor salt rotates daily and the old one is destroyed, so a visitor returning on another day counts once per day. That is the cost of not needing a consent banner, and the tooltip on the KPI says so. See storage.
• Sessions appear when they close, not when they start - a session's duration and bounce status aren't known until it ends. So a brand-new site shows pageviews immediately and sessions after the inactivity window plus a drain.
• Time on page needs the beacon. In server tracking mode it stays blank rather than showing a fabricated number.
• Sources need the server to see the request. The referrer is read when PHP renders the page; the beacon never sends one, because a browser-supplied referrer is forgeable. A session entering on a cached page is reported as Direct. UTM campaigns travel in the URL and are unaffected. See static & edge caching.
• __other__ is where values past the daily cardinality cap are folded. No views are lost - they're just not attributed individually.

The charts

Hand-rolled SVG, rendered server-side. No charting library, no CDN, nothing to download (C7); the only client-side JS is the hover layer.

Colours are Craft's own blue-600 and teal-600 - a pair validated for colour-vision deficiency (CVD ΔE 20.7, both above 3:1 contrast on the pane). Series are named in the legend and in the tooltip, and every chart has a table of the same data beneath or beside it, so nothing is ever encoded by colour alone. Table bars are a background wash with the number always spelled out next to them.