FAQs

Have any question about WP Statistics?

if you did’nt find your answer, you can contact us with email

[email protected]

Do I need to renew my license?

Yes. The licenses are automatically renewed every year so that you can continue to receive updates. Auto-renewals can also be turned off from your account.

What kind of support do you provide?

We offer premium support via email and are passionate about customer service.

Do you offer refunds?

Yes. We want you to be happy with your purchase and will work hard to make it happen. However, if you’re not completely satisfied for any reason, we offer a 14-day money-back guarantee.

When I upgrade or install WP Statistics 11.0 I get an error message like “Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_USE, expecting T_FUNCTION in…”

Since WP Statistics 11.0, PHP 5.4 or above has been required. If you are using an older version of PHP it cannot understand the new syntax included in WP Statistics 11.0 and generates a parse error.

Your hosting provider should have a newer version of PHP available, sometimes you must activate it through your hosting control panel.

Since the last release of PHP 5.3 is over 2 years ago (Aug 2014) and is no longer supported or receiving security fixes, if your provider does not support a newer version you should probably be moving hosting providers.

If you have done an upgrade and you can no longer access your site due to the parse error you will have to manually delete the wp-statistics directory from your wordpress/wp-content/plugins directory, either through your hosting providers control panel or FTP.

You may also downgrade to WP Statistics 10.3 as a temporary measure, but no new fixes or features will be added to that version and you should move to a newer version of PHP as soon as possible. You can download the 10.3 here.

IPv6 Support

WP Statistics supports IPv6 as of version 11.0, however PHP must be compiled with IPv6 support enabled, otherwise you may see warnings when a visitor from an IPv6 address hits your site.

You can check if IPv6 support is enabled in PHP by visiting the “Optimization -> Resources/Information -> Version Info- > PHP IPv6 Enabled” section.

If IPv6 is not enabled, you may see an warning like:

Warning: inet_pton() [function.inet-pton]: Unrecognized address 2003:0006:1507:5d71:6114:d8bd:80c2:1090

PHP 7.1 Support

WP Statistics has not yet been tested on PHP 7.1 and reports so far (As of February 2017) indicate there are issues.  As PHP 7.1 is still relatively new it is not recommended at this time.

PHP 7 Support

WP Statistics is PHP 7 compliant, however some versions of PHP 7 have bugs that can cause issues. One know issue is with PHP 7.0.4 causing memory exhaustion errors, newer versions of PHP 7 do not have this issue.

At this time (August 2016) WP Statistics seems to run fine with PHP 7.0.10, however you may experience issues that we haven’t found yet. If you do, feel free to report it after you’ve confirmed it is not a problem with PHP.

I see error messages in my PHP log like “WordPress database error Duplicate entry ‘YYYY-MM-DD’ for key ‘unique_date’ for …”

This is caused by a race condition in the code, it’s safe to ignore (it shouldn’t be labeled as an error really, but that is part of WordPress that we can’t control).

It happens when a new day starts and two visitors hit the site at nearly the same time for the first visit of the day. Both try and create a new row in the table to track the days visits, but only one of them success and the other throws this warning.

I’ve changed the permissions for WP Statistics access and now I’ve lost access to it myself, how to I fix it?

If you have access to phpMyAdmin (or similar tool) you can query the wp_options table:

SELECT * FROM wp_options WHERE option_name = 'wp_statistics';

Then edit the value, inside the string will be something like (note: “edit_plugins” will be whatever permission you selected):

s:15:"read_capability";s:12:"edit_plugins";s:17:"manage_capability";s:12:"edit_plugins";

Replace it with:

s:15:"read_capability";s:14:"manage_options";s:17:"manage_capability";s:14:"manage_options";

I’ve installed WP Statistics for the first time on a site and when I go to the statistics pages I get an error saying like “The following plugin table(s) do not exist in the database”

This is because something has gone wrong during the installation.

At the end of the message will be a list of tables that are missing, you can use the provided link to re-run the installation routine. If that does not resolve the issue and the visitors table is the only table listed, you may want to check your MySQL version. Some older versions of MySQL (in the 5.0.x series) have issues with complex compound indexes, which we use on the visitors table. If this is the case, check with your hosting provider and see if they can upgrade to a newer version of MySQL.

If you still have issues open a new thread on the support forum and we’ll try and resolve it for you.

I get an error message like “PHP Fatal error: Function name must be a string in /../parse-user-agent.php”

Do you have eAccelerator installed? If so this is a known issue with eAccelerator and PHP’s “anonymous” functions, which are used in the user agent parsing library. As no new versions of eAccelerator have been released for over 3 years, you should look to replace it or disable it.

Not all referrals are showing up in the search words list, why?

Unfortunate we’re completely dependent on the search engine sending use the search parameters as part of the referrer header, which they do not always do.

My overview screen is blank, what’s wrong?

This is usually caused by a PHP fatal error, check the page source and PHP logs.

The most common fatal error is an out of memory error. Check the Statistics->Optimization page and see how much memory is currently assigned to PHP and how much the overview is using.

If it is a memory issue you have two choices:

  • Increase PHP’s memory allocation
  • Delete some of your historical data.

See http://php.net/manual/en/ini.core.php#ini.memory-limitp for information about PHP’s memory limit.

To remove historical data you can use the Statistics -> Optimization -> Purging -> Purge records older than.

What’s the difference between Visits and Visitors?

Visits is the number of page hits your site has received.

Visitors is the number of unique users that have visited your site.

Visits should always be greater than Visitors (though there are a few times when this won’t be true on very low usage sites due to how the exclusion code works).

The average number of pages a visitor views on your site is Visits/Visitors.

Why did my visits suddenly jump way up today?

There can be many reasons for this, but the most common reason is a botnet has decided to visit your site and we have been unable to filter it out. You usually see your visits spike for a few days and then they give up.

The search words and search engine referrals are zero or very low, what’s wrong?

Search Engine Referrals and Words are highly dependent on the search engine providing the information to us and that often is not the case. Unfortunately there is nothing we can do about this, we report on everything we receive.

I’m getting an error in my PHP log like: Fatal error: Call to undefined method Composer\Autoload\ClassLoader::set()

We use several libraries and use a utility called Composer to manage the dependencies between them. We try and keep our Composer library up to date but not all plugins do and sometimes we find conflicts with other plugins. Try disabling your other plugins until the error goes away and then contact that plugin developer to update their Composer files.

I’ve decided to stay with WP Statistics 7.4 even though its a bad idea but now WordPress continuously reports there are updates available, how can I stop that?

Don’t, upgrade immediately to the latest version of WP Statistics.

When I upgrade or install WP Statistics I get an error message

When I upgrade or install WP Statistics I get an error message like

Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_STRING, expecting T_CONSTANT_ENCAPSED_STRING or '(

 

Since WP Statistics 8.0, PHP 5.3 or above has been required. If you are using an older version of PHP it cannot understand the new syntax included in WP Statistics 8.0 and generates a parse error.

Your hosting provider should have a newer version of PHP available, sometimes you must activate it through your hosting control panel.

Since the last release of PHP 5.2 is over 5 years ago (Jan 2011) and is no longer supported or receiving security fixes, if your provider does not support a newer version you should probably be moving hosting providers.

If you have done an upgrade and you can no longer access your site due to the parse error you will have to manually delete the wp-statistics directory from your wordpress/wp-content/plugins directory, either through your hosting providers control panel or FTP.

Do not use older versions of WP Statistics as they have know security issues and will leave your site vulnerable to attack.

I’m using another statistics plugin/service and get different numbers for them, why?

Pretty much every plugin/service is going to give you different results for visits and vistors, there are several reasons for this:

  • Web crawler detection
  • Detection method (javascript vs server-side PHP)
  • Centralized exclusions

Services that use centralized databases, like Google Analytics, for spam and robot detection have better detection than WP Statistics can. The trade off of course is relying on an external service.

The GeoIP database isn’t downloading

The GeoIP database isn’t downloading and when I force a download through the settings page I get the following error: “Error downloading GeoIP database from: http://geolite.maxmind.com/download/geoip/database/GeoLite2-Country.mmdb.gz – Forbidden”

This means that MaxMind has block the IP address of your webserver, this is often the case if it has been blacklisted in the past due to abuse.

You have two options:

  • Contact MaxMind and have them unblock your IP address
  • Manually download the database

To manually download the database and install it take the following steps:

  • On another system (any PC will do) download the maxmind database from http://geolite.maxmind.com/download/geoip/database/GeoLite2-Country.mmdb.gz
  • Decompress the database
  • Connect to your web host and create a “wp-statistics” directory in your wordpress uploads folder (usually it is located in wp-content, so you would create a directory “wp-content/uploads/wp-statistics”).
  • Upload the GeoLite-Country.mmdb file to the folder you just created.

You can also ask MaxMind to unblock your host. Note that automatic updates will not function until you can successfully download the database from your web server.

Does WP Statistics track the time of the hits?

No.

Does WP Statistics support multi-site?

WP Statistics doesn’t officially support multi-site however it does have limited functionally associated with it and should function without issue. However no support is provided at this time.

Version 8.8 is the first release that should install, upgrade and remove correctly on mutli-site as well as have some very basic support for the network admin menu. This should not be taken as an indication that WP Statistics fully support for multi-site, but only as a very preliminary first step.

I’m not receiving e-mail reports?

Make sure you have WordPress configured correctly for SMTP and also check your WP Cron is working correctly. You can use Cron View to examine your WP Cron table and see if there are any issues.

I’ve enabled IP subnet exclusions and now no visitors are recorded?

Be very careful to set the subnet mask correctly on the subnet list, it is very easy to catch too much traffic. Likewise if you are excluding a single IP address make sure to include a subnet mask of 32 or 255.255.255.255 otherwise you may not get the expected results.

How much memory does PHP Statistics require?

This depends on how many hits your site gets. The data collection code is very light weight, however the reporting and statistics code can take a lot of memory to process. The longer you collect data for the more memory you will need to process it. At a bare minimum, a basic WordPress site with WP Statistics should have at least 32 meg of RAM available for a page load. Sites with lots of plugins and high traffic should look at significantly increasing that (128 to 256 meg is not unreasonable).

GeoIP is enabled but no hits are being counted?

The GeoIP code requires several things to function, PHP 5.3 or above, the cURL extension and PHP cannot be running in safe mode. All of these conditions are checked for but there may be additional items required. Check your PHP log files and see if there are any fatal errors listed.

All visitors are being set to unknown for their location?

Make sure you’ve downloaded the GeoIP database and the GeoIP code is enabled.

Also, if your running an internal test site with non-routable IP addresses (like 192.168.x.x or 172.28.x.x or 10.x.x.x), these addresses will come up as unknown always.

What do I do if the plug does not work?

Disable then enable the plugin. You may also want to try removing and re-installing it as well. If it is still not working, please open a new support thread on the WordPress support forums.