About this plugin
Anomaly Detector watches your site’s traffic and tells you when it behaves unexpectedly, such as a sudden drop in page views, a spike from an unknown referrer, or a shift in the mobile / desktop mix.
The plugin collects a small set of aggregate metrics on your site and sends them to the Anomaly Detector service, where they are analysed. You receive an email when an anomaly is detected. Paid plans add hourly detection and Slack / Discord notifications.
What the plugin collects
- Page views
- Unique visitors (daily and hourly, based on a first-party cookie)
- Referrer host names (external sites only)
- Device type (mobile / desktop)
The plugin does not record IP addresses, user agents, page URLs or any personal data. Only aggregated counts leave your site.
How it works
- A small script ( assets/track.js ) is loaded on your public pages and sends a beacon to your own site for each page view. This also works behind full-page caches and CDNs.
- The plugin keeps daily and hourly counters in the WordPress options table.
- Once a day and once an hour, WP-Cron sends the completed counters to the Anomaly Detector API and deletes them locally.
- The service runs the anomaly detection and notifies you.
Notification channels, detection history and monthly usage are managed in the Anomaly Detector dashboard, which you connect to from the plugin settings page.
External services
This plugin relies on the Anomaly Detector service, a third-party hosted service operated by the plugin author. It cannot work without it.
The plugin communicates with the following endpoints:
- https://anomaly-detector.eng-974.workers.dev (API) – receives the aggregated metrics listed above, once a day and once an hour, and serves plan information and the connection handshake. Requests are authenticated with a per-site API key.
- https://anomaly-detector-console.eng-974.workers.dev (dashboard) – the site administrator is redirected here when connecting the plugin. The site URL and site name are passed in the URL so the service can register the site.
No data is sent until the site administrator explicitly connects the plugin from the settings page. Disconnecting stops all transmission.
dev/terms
dev/privacy
Cookies
To count unique visitors the plugin sets two first-party cookies on your visitors’ browsers: webanomaly_seen_<date> (expires after one day) and webanomaly_seen_<date>T<hour> (expires after one hour). They contain the value 1 only and are not used to identify visitors. Depending on your jurisdiction you may need to disclose them in your cookie policy.