Honest Analytics

In the default configuration no cookie is set, no identifier persists past the day, nothing is stored per person and no third party is involved. Many operators treat that as outside consent requirements. Whether it is outside yours is a question for whoever advises you on it - this plugin will not tell you that you are compliant, because it is not in a position to know. The Privacy screen states exactly what the configuration permits, in as many words, so that conversation can start from facts.

Usually higher, because content blockers do not stop server-side counting. Where they are lower it is normally GPC: visitors who ask not to be counted are not counted, at all.

Yes, and from the free edition - GA4 import is not held back for the paid one. Analytics -> Import data connects to the property, shows you the range Google has, and brings it across a chunk at a time; progress is saved as it goes, so you can close the tab and come back. Only permission to read is requested, nothing is written back to Google, and the connection can be removed from the same screen. The one-off part is Google's: nothing may read your analytics until you have registered the thing asking. That is free, needs no card, and takes about five minutes. The Import screen prints each step with your own site's values already filled in. WP Statistics and Independent Analytics import too, and those need no setup at all - the data is already in your database. Expect pageviews to line up closely and visitor counts not to: GA4 counts users its own way, and a unique visitor here is a daily estimate. Importing the same dates again replaces what was imported before rather than doubling it.

Because the identity is destroyed every 24 hours. Unique visitors are daily estimates, and adding two days together would double-count anybody who came on both. The plugin merges the underlying sketches rather than summing them, and says so wherever the number appears.

Yes, in server mode. In the default hybrid mode a visitor without JavaScript is still counted by the server, as long as the page was not served from cache.

Yes. CSV and JSON from every report screen, and through WP-CLI, in the free edition. Exports are protected against spreadsheet formula injection.

Neither. Counting works on hosting with no scheduled tasks at all: ordinary page views drive the drain, the nightly tidy-up runs from the first admin page load of the day, and the identity salt rotates lazily when it falls due. Maintenance also has buttons on the Settings screen, so nothing the plugin needs doing requires WP-CLI. If you do have cron, it makes the figures slightly fresher on a busy site, and that is all it changes.

Yes. Each site gets its own tables, settings and reports.

No. Nothing about your site, your traffic or your use of the plugin is ever sent anywhere, and there is nothing in it that reports back - no telemetry, no licence check, no update check, no remote configuration. The plugin makes one kind of outbound request, which you start and which sends us nothing: importing your history from Google Analytics. It can also answer a reporting tool you connect to it, which is off unless you do. It calls your own site once a day to check that the collection endpoint answers and that the write spool is not readable over the web. External services below says exactly what each one is.

Nothing. Both editions read and write the same tables, so your history appears unchanged. Downgrading is equally safe: the tables are left alone and the paid reports simply stop being rendered.

By default the tables are kept, because the rollups cannot be rebuilt from anything else - there is no raw hit data to replay. Deleting them is an option on the Settings screen that you have to choose deliberately.