README

Real visitor numbers for your Bolt CMS site. No cookies, no cookie pop-up, no bots.

You want to know if people visit your Bolt CMS site. But Google Analytics uses cookies, so in many countries you must show a cookie pop-up first (the box that asks visitors to say yes to cookies). Many people click no, so they never show up in your numbers. Bots add fake visits on top.

This extension adds the Privatus Analytics script to every front-end page of your Bolt CMS site. You set your site ID once in a config file. Your own visits are not counted while you are logged in, unless you turn that off. The script sets no cookies and keeps no IP addresses. Bots are filtered out before they are counted.

So you see how many real people came, which pages they looked at and where they came from, on one simple dashboard. A report comes to your inbox each week, and you can set alerts for when traffic jumps or drops. And you don't need a cookie pop-up for your analytics.

Free plan, no card: 10,000 events a month (an event is a page view or an action you track) on up to 3 sites. Start free at privatusanalytics.com.

No cookies. No cookies and no hidden IDs on your visitors' devices, and no IP addresses are kept. Laws differ by country, so check your own legal advice.
Real people, not bots. Known bots, data centers and spam visits are left out on every plan.
Small and fast. The script is about 3 KB when compressed.

Requirements

Bolt CMS 6 (tested on 6.1.10). PHP 8.2 or later.
A Privatus Analytics site ID. It starts with pa_. You find it in Privatus Analytics under Site settings, Tracking.

Install

composer require privatus/bolt-privatus-analytics
php bin/console extensions:configure

The second command copies the default settings to config/extensions/privatus-boltanalytics.yaml.

Setup

Open config/extensions/privatus-boltanalytics.yaml, paste your site ID and clear the cache:

site_id: pa_YOURSITEID
modules: [engage, auto, vitals, clicks, ask]
skip_logged_in: true

php bin/console cache:clear

Until you set a valid site ID, the extension adds nothing to your pages. The tag goes at the end of <head> on front-end pages. The Bolt back end never gets it.

Settings

Setting	What it does
`site_id`	Your Privatus Analytics site ID, like `pa_7Q2K9XH3AB`. If it is empty, the `PRIVATUS_SITE_ID` environment variable is used. A value that does not look like a site ID prints nothing.
`modules`	The extra tracking to load. `engage` is time on page and how far people scroll. `auto` is clicks on outside links, file downloads, forms people send and missing pages (404). `vitals` is page speed (Web Vitals). `clicks` is click maps. `ask` is short surveys on your site. Use `[]` to load none.
`skip_logged_in`	On by default. People logged in to Bolt get no script, so your own visits are not counted.

With the default settings, the extension adds this to each page:

<script defer src="https://privatusstats.com/js/pa.js" data-site="pa_YOURSITEID" data-modules="engage,auto,vitals,clicks,ask"></script>

External service

After you save a site ID, every page loads https://privatusstats.com/js/pa.js in the visitor's browser. The script sends the page address (query parameters are removed except campaign parameters), the referrer, the browser language, the screen width, the time zone name and event names to https://privatusstats.com/api/event. The visitor's IP address is read in memory to work out a rough country and to count unique visits, and it is not stored.

Development

composer install && vendor/bin/phpunit   # tag builder tests
./scripts/verify-docker.sh               # real Bolt project in Docker: install, configure, check pages

License

MIT. See LICENSE.

privatus / bolt-privatus-analytics

Package info

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