Analytics

The Analytics page of each site shows how many people visit it and what they read. It’s measured from the requests Edge Caching already serves, so there’s nothing to install on your site, no script slowing your pages down and no cookie set on your visitors.

What you see

Pick Today, 7 days or 30 days at the top of the page.

Figure	Meaning
Unique visitors	Different people who viewed at least one page in the period
Page views	Pages opened, counting each reload and each page of a visit
Views per visit	Page views divided by unique visitors
Visitors right now	Unique visitors in the last 5 minutes

Below the chart, the top lists show your most viewed pages, where visitors came from (sources: the site that linked to you, or Direct / none when there was no referring site), their countries, the utm_source of your campaigns, and their devices and browsers. Changes compared with the previous period are shown under the headline numbers. Today’s numbers update every 30 seconds.

What counts as a page view

A page view is a page opened in a browser. These are not counted:

• images, stylesheets, scripts, fonts and other files
• background requests such as AJAX calls and admin-ajax.php
• requests that fail (404, 5xx) or are blocked by the firewall
• the WordPress admin, login and REST API (/wp-admin, /wp-login.php, /wp-json), feeds and robots.txt
• search engine crawlers, monitoring services, link previews, scripts and other bots that identify themselves
• pages the browser only prefetches in the background

Pages served from the cache and pages built by WordPress are counted the same way.

How unique visitors are counted

Edge Caching doesn’t set a cookie. Each day, a visitor is recognized by a one-way fingerprint of their IP address and browser, mixed with a random value that changes every day and is then destroyed. Only these fingerprints are counted, never stored with the IP address, and they can’t be linked from one day to the next or from one site to another.

Visitors over 7 or 30 days are counted across the whole period, not added up day by day, so someone who visits on three different days counts once. Counts use a statistical method that is accurate to about 1 to 2%.

Note

Because no cookie is used, a few situations are counted differently from cookie-based tools:

• A person who visits from their phone and their computer counts as two visitors.
• Several people sharing one IP address with the same browser, such as in an office, can count as one visitor.
• A person whose IP address changes during the day, such as a phone switching networks, can count twice.

Compared with Google Analytics

Expect Edge Caching to show more visitors than Google Analytics. It counts every browser that opens a page, including visitors who block trackers or decline cookies, which Google Analytics can’t see. Both tools can run at the same time: see Analytics and tracking tools.

Analytics doesn’t measure time on page or bounce rate: those need a script running in the visitor’s browser.

Privacy

No cookie is set and no personal data is stored: no IP address, no browser fingerprint that lasts more than a day, no visitor profile. Only aggregated counts per page, source, country, device and browser are kept. These numbers are available only to people with access to the site in the dashboard.

History

Detailed history is kept for 13 months. Removing a site from Edge Caching deletes its analytics.