Sawir Insights

Hosted analytics services like Hotjar and Microsoft Clarity are excellent tools with generous free tiers — and they work by sending a record of your visitors' behavior to their servers. Sawir Insights trades that cross-site infrastructure for one constraint: everything is collected, stored, and viewed on your own site. Choose a hosted service if you want its extras and don't mind third-party processing; choose Sawir Insights if visitor data leaving your server is a dealbreaker. Recordings and heatmaps live in your own database and uploads directory, so the retention settings matter more here than in a SaaS.

The plugin is built for privacy-conscious deployments: data stays on your server, IP addresses are never stored, retention is configurable, Do Not Track is honored, and WordPress export/erasure tools are integrated. Compliance itself depends on your configuration, notices, legal basis, and consent implementation — consult qualified counsel for your site.

Those are hosted services: capable tools, but your visitors' behavior is recorded onto their servers under their terms. Sawir Insights covers the same category — heatmaps, session recordings, surveys, funnels, form analytics — as a plugin that keeps everything on your own server, with no account, no external service, and no data sharing.

No. The plugin sends no behavioral data to Sawir Studio or any analytics provider. Events live in your WordPress database; recording files live beneath your protected uploads directory.

Yes. I keep this as a wp-config.php-only setting so database credentials never enter the WordPress options table. Define all four constants before the "That's all, stop editing" line: define( 'SWINS_DB_HOST', 'localhost' ); define( 'SWINS_DB_NAME', 'analytics' ); define( 'SWINS_DB_USER', 'analytics_user' ); define( 'SWINS_DB_PASSWORD', 'a-strong-password' ); The analytics tables keep the main site's table prefix, so moving between the WordPress database and an external database is a plain table copy. Do not run two live collecting databases for one site: copy the tables, switch the constants, and only then resume collection. Otherwise you will split one site's history across two databases.

No.

Enable "Require consent before tracking," then call window.swinsConsent('grant') when consent is granted and window.swinsConsent('revoke') when it is withdrawn. The decision is saved in a first-party cookie.

No. Form capture records selectors, timing, and empty-state metadata only. Values never leave the browser.

Recording is disabled by default. When enabled, all input values are masked automatically, canvas capture is off, and replay chunks stay beneath the guarded wp-content/uploads/sawir-insights/recordings/ directory. Only administrators can retrieve them, through an authenticated REST endpoint.

Add the swins-mask class or data-swins-mask attribute to mask an element's text. Add the swins-block class to omit an element entirely from recordings.

Insights → Settings has separate recording retention and disk-cap controls. Past the cap, the oldest recordings are removed first. Usage is tracked continuously and recalculated weekly.

Each active survey can target URL patterns, devices, a stable percentage of sessions, time on page, scroll depth, or desktop exit intent. One survey per browser session; dismissed surveys stay hidden for 30 days.

Funnels are computed from ordered page-view and click metadata retained on your server, so history is bounded by the raw-event retention window in Insights → Settings.

I fold raw events into heatmap aggregates hourly through WP-Cron. WordPress only runs WP-Cron when someone visits the site, so on a low-traffic site I recommend a real system cron, for example: */5 * * * * cd /path/to/wordpress && wp cron event run --due-now

• Fix: survey responses now have their own retention period (Insights → Settings, 365 days by default). Previously they never expired, and they kept their sessions — user ID, country, entry URL and referrer — beyond the raw-event retention window.
• Fix: raw click, mouse-move and scroll events are deleted at the retention cutoff even if heatmap aggregation has stalled (for example when WP-Cron is not running).
• Fix: reactivating an archived funnel skips sessions that are already past the raw-event retention window, and the report shows that span as a gap instead of silently under-counting.

• Added the self-hosted analytics foundation.
• Added optional wp-config.php constants for keeping analytics tables in a dedicated database.
• Added click, movement and scroll collection and heatmap aggregation.
• Added live-page heatmap administration.
• Added privacy controls, consent API, exporter and eraser.
• Added sampled session recording capture, protected chunk storage, retention, disk-cap eviction, recording administration, and rrweb playback.
• Vendored rrweb 2.1.0 and rrweb-player 2.1.0 browser bundles locally.
• Added targeted popup surveys and an accessible persistent feedback widget.
• Added survey administration, per-question results, NPS scoring, and CSV export.
• Added privacy-safe daily form analytics with field timing, abandonment, and completion reporting.
• Added ordered page-view and click funnels with retention-aware daily conversion reports.
• Added the analytics dashboard with KPI deltas, an inline daily trend chart, device, browser, OS, page, referrer, and UTM breakdowns, funnel and recording summaries, and date, device, and UTM source filters.