Visit Notifications user manual

Visit Notifications emails the site administrator when someone visits a page you have chosen: a “read receipt” for web pages. Use it to know when a client opens a proposal, quote or preview page, or how often a key page is seen, without setting up analytics. This manual covers version 3.2.0.

What it does

You choose which pages to track. For each one you choose how you hear about visits:

• On Visit: one email for every visit, sent straight away.
• Hourly: one summary email per hour listing every visit in that hour.
• Daily: one summary email per day listing every visit in that day.

It works on posts, pages and custom post types, and on category, tag and custom taxonomy archive pages. Pages you have not turned on are never reported.

Before you start

• WordPress 6.5 or later (tested up to 7.1) and PHP 7.4 or later.
• The site must be able to send email. If its emails go missing, set up an SMTP plugin such as WP Mail SMTP first.
• An administrator login (to change the global settings) or an editor login (to turn tracking on for pages).

Install

Who receives the emails

Emails go to the Administration Email Address in Settings → General. There is no separate recipient setting yet. To send them somewhere else, change that address or forward the emails from that mailbox.

Global settings

Settings → Visit Notifications. These apply to the whole site. Click Save Settings after changing anything.

Turn notifications on for a page

Posts, pages and custom post types

Categories, tags and custom taxonomies

Several pages at once

There is no bulk action for Daily; set Daily on each page. Post and page lists also have a Visit Notifications column showing Disabled or Enabled (On Visit / Hourly / Daily).

When a visit is reported

A visit is reported only when all of these are true:

1. Enable Notifications is on in the global settings.
2. It is a front-end visit to a single post, page or custom post, or to a category, tag or custom taxonomy archive. The blog posts listing, search results, author and date archives are never reported. A static front page is a normal page and can be tracked.
3. Notifications are enabled for that page.
4. If Disable Crawlers is on, the browser identifier does not contain “bot”.
5. If the visitor is logged in, logged-in users are allowed (the page’s own choice, or the global setting when the page says Respect Global).
6. If IP Grace Period is on, the same visitor has not already been reported within the grace period.

The emails

On Visit

Subject: [Site name] New Visitor on Page title. It links to the page and lists:

• Access Time, in the site’s timezone and date format (Settings → General).
• User Agent: the visitor’s browser and device.
• Referer: the page they came from, or “unknown” (typed in, or from an app or email).
• IP Address (anonymised): the last part is replaced with zeros, so it identifies the network, not the person.
• Location and Timezone: only when “Look up visitor location” is on and the lookup worked.

Hourly and Daily summaries

Subject: [Site name] Visitor Report for Page title. It says how many visits there were in the past hour or day, then lists the same details for each visit. One email is sent per page; a page with no visits gets no email.

When summaries are sent

Summaries are sent by WP-Cron, WordPress’s built-in scheduler. The hourly and daily runs count from when the plugin was first activated, not from the top of the hour or midnight. WP-Cron only runs when the site gets visits, so on a quiet site a summary can arrive late. If the host runs a real cron job for wp-cron.php, timing is reliable.

Privacy

For tracked pages only, the plugin records the time of the visit, the browser user agent, the referring page and the anonymised IP address. It sets no cookies.

• On Visit details are emailed and not stored.
• Hourly and Daily details are stored with the page until the summary is sent, then deleted.
• With the IP Grace Period on, a one-way hash of the anonymised IP address is kept for the length of the grace period.
• The plugin adds suggested wording to Settings → Privacy → Policy Guide for the site’s privacy policy.

Customising the emails

Copy the template into the active theme (ideally a child theme) and edit the copy. The theme copy is used instead of the plugin’s and survives plugin updates.

For developers

• Filter visitnotifications_lookup_location: whether to look up the location for a visit. Default is the “Look up visitor location” setting. Arguments: $lookup (bool), $ip (anonymised IP), $object (WP_Post or WP_Term).
• Filter visitnotifications_menu_settings: change where the settings page sits in the admin menu.
• Per-page settings (post meta and term meta): vn_enable_notifications (1 or 0), vn_schedule (visit, hourly, daily), vn_logged_in (global, on, off).
• Global settings: options named visitnotifications_*.
• Queued visits: meta visitnotifications_visitors. Grace periods: option or meta visitnotifications_ip_grace_period_data.
• Cron hook: visitnotifications_send_emails, scheduled twice, with the argument hourly and daily.

// Never look up visitor locations, whatever the setting says.
add_filter( 'visitnotifications_lookup_location', '__return_false' );

// Turn on hourly notifications for a page in code.
update_post_meta( $post_id, 'vn_enable_notifications', '1' );
update_post_meta( $post_id, 'vn_schedule', 'hourly' );

Deactivating and deleting

• Deactivate: stops all tracking and removes the scheduled summary runs. Settings and per-page choices are kept.
• Delete (from the Plugins screen): also removes all settings, per-page choices, visits waiting for a summary and grace period data.

Troubleshooting

No emails at all

1. Check Enable Notifications is on in Settings → Visit Notifications.
2. Check the page shows Enabled in the Visit Notifications column.
3. If you are testing while logged in, check logged-in users are allowed, or test in a private window.
4. If the IP Grace Period is on, your test visit may be inside it. Wait, or turn it off while testing.
5. Check the site sends email at all (try a password reset). If not, set up an SMTP plugin.
6. Check the spam folder and the Administration Email Address in Settings → General.

Some visits are missing

Page caching (a caching plugin, the host’s cache, or Cloudflare caching whole pages) serves a stored copy of the page without running WordPress, so the plugin never sees the visit. Logged-out visitors are hit hardest. Exclude the tracked pages from every cache.

Summaries are late or missing

The site probably gets little traffic, or WP-Cron is turned off (DISABLE_WP_CRON in wp-config.php) with no real cron job replacing it. Ask the host to run wp-cron.php every 5 to 15 minutes.

Emails about bots

Make sure Disable Crawlers is on. Some crawlers do not call themselves bots; the User Agent line in the email shows what visited.

No location in the emails

Location lookup is off by default; turn on “Look up visitor location”. If it is on, ipapi.co may have been down, slow (the plugin waits one second) or over its free limit, or the visitor was on a private or local network.

“Bundled libraries are missing” and the plugin deactivates itself

That copy came from GitHub, or it is version 3.1.0, whose WordPress.org package had this fault. Update to 3.2.0 or later from WordPress.org.

Known limitations

• Emails always go to the Administration Email Address.
• Bulk actions offer On Visit and Hourly, not Daily.
• Crawler detection only recognises browser identifiers containing “bot”.
• Visits to cached pages are not seen.
• Summary timing depends on WP-Cron.

Help and support

• Plugin page: wordpress.org/plugins/visit-notifications
• Support forum: wordpress.org/support/plugin/visit-notifications
• Internal reference for the team: Plugin: Visit Notifications