About this plugin
CauseTrail helps website owners and developers understand what is happening on their WordPress website. The free plugin securely connects WordPress to the hosted CauseTrail website intelligence service. io.
Same website. Same data. Two trails.
- Human Trail explains issues in plain language: what happened, how serious it appears, and what may need attention.
- Developer Trail presents the recorded technical evidence, such as error messages, files, lines, timestamps, request paths, and related activity.
io service. This plugin does not add a second monitoring dashboard inside WordPress.
What it monitors
Once an administrator connects the website, the plugin can report WordPress and PHP environment details, installed plugin and theme information, site health heartbeats, PHP and browser errors, WordPress changes and account activity, HTTP errors, homepage response measurements, and WooCommerce order summaries when WooCommerce is active. io stores and interprets this information, groups issues, and presents it in Human Trail and Developer Trail.
Traffic Trail counts public pages rendered by WordPress and groups them by a locally determined human/bot category. Classification is a user-agent heuristic, not verified visitor identity or a unique-visitor count. Pages served entirely from a full-page/CDN cache without running WordPress, and client-side navigation without a new WordPress page render, are not counted.
CauseTrail is a monitoring tool, not a security firewall or backup service. It cannot observe failures that prevent WordPress from loading unless another connected monitoring source detects them.
How it works
- Install and activate CauseTrail.
- Create a CauseTrail.io account and add your website.
- Generate a connection key in CauseTrail.io, then enter it under Settings > CauseTrail in WordPress.
- Review your website’s intelligence at CauseTrail.io and switch between Human Trail and Developer Trail as needed.
Activation alone does not start monitoring. The administrator must intentionally connect the website. Disconnecting removes the local connection credential and stops plugin telemetry; it does not delete the CauseTrail account or stored service history.
Uninstalling does not delete remote data.
Pricing
The WordPress plugin is free and contains no paid code unlocks or license gates. io is a separate paid monitoring service. An account’s first connected website receives a 30-day service trial; additional websites require paid activation.
Continued monitoring after the trial requires a subscription. All service features are included. See current service pricing before connecting.
External Service and Privacy
io service. io to establish a connection. io.
No monitoring data is sent before connection. The plugin does not send visitor cookies, form submissions, request bodies, payment card data, or WordPress passwords as intended inputs.
Depending on site activity and installed software, transmitted data can include WordPress/PHP/server versions, installed themes and plugins, site configuration, WooCommerce order identifiers and totals, WordPress account names/emails/roles for people able to manage or edit the site, account and content change events, request paths without query strings, error text and file/stack information, visitor IP addresses for selected account events, browser errors, and homepage performance measurements.
Error text and URLs may contain information supplied by other plugins or visitors; site administrators should review whether this monitoring is appropriate for their site and privacy obligations.
The plugin stores the site connection credential and limited scheduling/status information in the WordPress database. io stores and processes the transmitted data to provide monitoring and intelligence. See the CauseTrail Privacy Policy and Terms of Use.
For traffic counts, raw user-agent text is classified locally. Only the category (human, search crawler, AI crawler, social bot, monitoring service, or other bot) is sent through the authenticated connection. io stores hourly category totals.
Traffic reports do not include visitor IPs, cookies, persistent visitor identifiers, page paths, referrers, query strings, or raw user-agent text. CauseTrail’s own availability, preview, and performance probes are excluded.