Exposure Meter

Privacy-first visitor statistics for WordPress, made for musicians and record labels. It stores no IP addresses, sets no cookies, loads nothing from other servers in the dashboard, and draws a world map of where your listeners are.

Built for and in use on anoise.org, the website of the Noise à Noise label.

What it shows

• Overview: page views, visitors, first visits, pages hit, who is online now, a 30-day trend, today's activity by hour, top content and where visitors came from (direct, search, social, other sites).
• Content: every post and page with views and visitors. Archives, the front page and other pages are listed by their address.
• Audience: a world map and table of countries, plus devices, browsers and operating systems.
• Campaigns: links tagged with utm_campaign, utm_source and utm_medium, so you can see which announcement, newsletter or post brought people in, and which sites link to you.
• Real-time: who is on the site right now and which pages they are reading.
• A statistics box on each post's editing screen, a 30-day sparkline in the post lists, a dashboard widget, and an optional daily or weekly email report.

Content	Real-time

The screenshots use invented demo data.

Privacy

• No IP addresses are stored. A visitor's address is shortened the moment it arrives (the last part of an IPv4 address is set to 0; of an IPv6 address only the network part is kept), and only the shortened form is ever used.
• Visitors are recognised for one day only. A one-way code is made from the shortened address, the browser's name, the date and a secret of your site. It changes every day, so the same person is counted once per day and cannot be followed from one day to the next.
• No cookies are set, and nothing in the visitor's browser is read or stored.
• Country lookup. To know a visitor's country, the shortened address (for example 203.0.113.0) is sent to ip-api.com and the answer is cached for a day. Their free service is for non-commercial use and works over plain HTTP; please read their terms before using this plugin on a commercial site. Looking countries up inside the plugin is planned (see below).
• The dashboard loads nothing from other servers. The chart library and the fonts come with the plugin.
• Chosen user roles (administrators and editors by default) and known bots are not counted.

This describes what the plugin does; it is not legal advice about your obligations.

Requirements

• WordPress 6.0 or later
• PHP 8.0 or later
• MySQL or MariaDB (as WordPress itself)

Installation

1. Download exposure-meter.zip from the latest release.
2. In WordPress, go to Plugins → Add New → Upload Plugin, choose the file and activate it.
3. Open Exposure Meter → Settings:
   • If your site uses a page cache (LiteSpeed Cache, WP Rocket, W3 Total Cache, WP Super Cache…), turn on Cache-Compatible Mode. Cached pages are then counted by a small script in the page; without it, most visits to cached pages are missed. The settings page tells you when it finds one of these plugins.
   • Choose which user roles are not counted, how long detailed visits are kept, and whether you want an email report.

Statistics use your site's time zone (Settings → General).

Planned improvements

• Look up countries inside the plugin, so no address leaves your server.
• Keep long-term history: daily totals are already saved but not yet shown, so visits older than the retention period disappear from the charts.
• A setting for sites behind a proxy or Cloudflare, so the visitor's address is read from the right place and cannot be faked.
• Translations, and the changes needed for the WordPress.org plugin directory.

How it is built

• One PHP file, exposure-meter.php, plus world-map.json and assets/.
• The world map is drawn in advance by tools/build-world-map.mjs from Natural Earth data, so the browser only colours finished shapes.
• tests/exposure-meter.php checks the parts that need no WordPress: php tests/exposure-meter.php. It runs on every push (see .github/workflows/test.yml).
• Changes are listed in CHANGELOG.md.

Credits

• Chart.js 4.4.0, MIT License (assets/LICENSE-chartjs.txt)
• DM Sans and DM Mono, SIL Open Font License 1.1 (assets/fonts/LICENSE-fonts.txt)
• Country shapes from Natural Earth (public domain) via world-atlas, drawn with d3-geo when the map is built

Licence

GNU General Public License, version 2 or (at your option) any later version. See LICENSE.

Made by Soheil Soheili.