Install
Vireo Analytics needs WordPress 6.9 or newer and PHP 7.4 or newer.
- In WordPress, go to Plugins, Add New, and search for Vireo Analytics.
- Install and activate it.
Counting starts as soon as the plugin is active. You don’t need an account anywhere.
Find your numbers
Vireo adds a Vireo Analytics menu to WordPress with two screens: Overview, where your numbers are, and Settings.
The Overview has four tabs: Overview, Search & AI, Page speed, and Issues & campaigns. Settings has five: General, Tracking, Email digest, Search Console & API, and Import & export.
The first pageviews usually appear within a minute. Each view is written to a small file first, and Vireo moves those views into your database once a minute. That runs on WordPress’s scheduled tasks, so on a site with no traffic and no real cron set up, the first numbers can take a little longer.
If your site uses full-page caching, pages that were cached before you installed Vireo don’t carry the tracker until the cache refreshes. Clearing the cache once fixes that.
What it counts
- Pageviews. One for each page a visitor sees. A page opened in the background is counted when it becomes visible. Pages a browser prefetches without anyone looking at them aren’t counted as views.
- Visitors. Vireo combines the visitor’s IP address and browser with a secret that changes every day, and keeps only a scrambled result. That tells one visitor from another for a day, without cookies, and the result can’t be traced back to the IP once the day’s secret is gone. Over a range of several days, Visitors is the sum of each day’s visitors.
- Repeat views. A single visitor counts for at most five views of one page and fifty views in total per day. Anything past that is reported separately rather than inflating your numbers.
What it leaves out
- Your own visits while you’re logged in as an administrator. You can turn that on under Settings, General, “Track logged-in admins”. Other logged-in users, such as editors or customers, are counted.
- The paths
/wp-admin/*and/wp-login.php, plus any paths, IP addresses or countries you add under Settings, Tracking, Exclusions. - Bots, which are counted separately. See Bot filtering.
- Visitors who send Do Not Track or Global Privacy Control.
- Previews, feeds and robots.txt, which never load the tracker.
Countries
If your host or CDN tells WordPress which country a visitor is in, countries work straight away. If not, Settings, Tracking has a button to download a free country database. Until one of those is in place, countries show as unknown.
If your theme has no footer hook
Vireo loads its script through the standard WordPress footer. If your theme doesn’t call wp_footer(), add this line just before </body>:
<?php do_action( 'vireo_print_tracking_script' ); ?>Next
- Import your history from the tool you used before.
- Connect Search Console to see the searches behind each post.