About this plugin
GW Live Visitors gives you real-time insights about your website traffic directly inside the WordPress admin.
See how many visitors are currently active, what pages are trending, and where your traffic is coming from — without exposing any counters publicly.
Unlike heavy analytics tools, GW Live Visitors is lightweight, privacy-friendly and focused on what really matters:
– Real-time visitor count (updated automatically)
– Top pages and activity trends
– Admin-only view (no public display)
– Sessions stored only short-term (24h / 7d) for performance and privacy
Why only 24h / 7d?
Because the goal is speed and simplicity. Keeping session data forever would bloat your database, slow down queries, and create GDPR/privacy concerns. By limiting storage, the plugin stays fast and keeps your data footprint small — while still giving you meaningful daily and weekly insights.
If you need long-term analytics, you can combine this with a dedicated tool such as Matomo, Plausible or Google Analytics.
External Services
GW Live Visitors makes use of the following external libraries and data sources:
Leaflet.js
- Purpose: Interactive map display of visitor locations.
- License: BSD 2-Clause License
- Homepage: https://leafletjs.com/
OpenStreetMap Tiles
- Purpose: Map tiles for the visitor map.
- License: Open Database License (ODbL)
- Homepage: https://www.openstreetmap.org/
World Countries GeoJSON
- Purpose: Country boundaries and metadata for highlighting top countries.
- License: MIT License
- Source: https://github.com/mledoze/countries
IP Geolocation (optional)
If geolocation is enabled in the plugin settings, the visitor’s IP address is sent to a third-party service to resolve country and approximate coordinates. Users can choose which provider to use or keep geolocation disabled for full privacy.
- ipapi.co — Used to look up the visitor’s country and coordinates. Sends the visitor’s IP address on each request. Terms: https://ipapi.co/terms/ — Privacy: https://ipapi.co/privacy/
- ipinfo.io — Used to look up the visitor’s country and coordinates. Sends the visitor’s IP address on each request. Terms: https://ipinfo.io/legal — Privacy: https://ipinfo.io/privacy-policy
Privacy Notice
By default, GW Live Visitors does not collect, transmit or store any personally identifiable information (PII).
Only anonymous session IDs and page hits are stored locally in your WordPress database.
If you enable the “Collect IP, User-Agent, country & coordinates” setting, the following applies:
- Visitor IP addresses, User-Agent strings, and derived geolocation data may be stored locally in your database.
- When using an external geolocation provider (ipapi.co or ipinfo.io), the visitor’s IP address is transmitted to that service in order to resolve country and approximate coordinates.
- No cookies are set by this plugin.
- All data remains private to your WordPress installation unless you choose to export it.
It is the site owner’s responsibility to update their site’s privacy policy if enabling IP and geolocation collection.