Description
Immediately receive email notifications when a visitor accesses a page on your site. Provides a visitor’s basic information to you as soon as they visit the page, such as time of access, user agent, HTTP referrer and anonymised IP Address. Optionally, the approximate location and timezone can be added too (see External services).
And instead of immediately receiving an email about the visitor the email can be delayed by a day or hour which will send a visit summary.
Notifications can be turned on for any post, page or custom post type, and for category, tag and custom taxonomy archive pages.
External services
This plugin can use the ipapi.co service to look up the approximate location (city and country) and timezone of a visitor, to include in the notification email. This is off by default: no request is made to ipapi.co unless an administrator ticks “Look up visitor location” under Settings > Visit Notifications.
When it is turned on:
- What is sent: the visitor’s anonymised IP address (the last part of an IPv4 address, or the last 80 bits of an IPv6 address, is replaced with zeros). Nothing else is sent.
- When: each time a visit is recorded on a page that has notifications enabled.
- Service: ipapi.co, provided by Kloudend, Inc. Terms of service, privacy policy.
Developers can also decide per visit with the visitnotifications_lookup_location filter, whose default is the setting. For example, to never look up locations:
add_filter( 'visitnotifications_lookup_location', '__return_false' );<h3>Privacy</h3>
For pages with notifications enabled, the plugin records the time of the visit, the browser user agent, the referring page and the anonymised IP address. These are emailed to the site administrator straight away, or kept with the page until the hourly or daily summary is sent and then deleted. The anonymised IP address is only sent to ipapi.co if “Look up visitor location” is turned on. If the IP grace period is enabled, a hash of the anonymised IP address is kept for the length of the grace period. Suggested text is added to Settings > Privacy for your privacy policy.
Deleting the plugin removes its settings, any visits waiting for a summary and the per-page settings.
Installation
- Search for Visit Notifications in the WordPress Plugin Repo
- Install the plugin
- Activate the plugin
- Turn notifications on for a page in the Visit Notifications box when editing it, or with the bulk actions on the Pages and Posts screens. Global options are under Settings > Visit Notifications.
FAQ
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Where is visit notification email sent to?
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The current version sends the email only to the admin email address (which can be found in Settings > General).
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Can I change the email?
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Yes. Copy
templates/emails/single.phportemplates/emails/delayed.phpfrom the plugin totemplates/visitnotifications/in your theme and edit the copy.
Reviews
Contributors & Developers
“Visit Notifications” is open source software. The following people have contributed to this plugin.
Contributors
“Visit Notifications” has been translated into 2 locales. Thank you to the translators for their contributions.
Translate “Visit Notifications” into your language.
Interested in development?
Browse the code, check out the SVN repository, or subscribe to the development log by RSS.
Changelog
We use the Semantic Versioning system of defining versions (https://semver.org/).
This means that version 1.10 is a minor update for the version 1.x branch and version 2.0 is a MAJOR update.
We will not wrap version numbers of double digits.
3.2.0
- fix: the plugin package now includes its bundled libraries; 3.1.0 deactivated itself because they were missing
- fix: the “Local to Post” IP grace period can now be saved, and works on archive pages
- fix: the Disable Crawlers setting is now honoured
- fix: pages with no saved logged in users choice now follow the global setting
- fix: deactivating the plugin now removes its scheduled events
- fix: no PHP warnings or errors on author, date and post type archives, for requests without a valid IP address, or from the location lookup
- fix: the Settings link on the Plugins screen opens the settings page
- fix: email times use the site’s timezone and date format
- security: capability check for each item in the bulk actions; settings fields escaped
- feat: emails, bulk notices and admin text are translatable
- privacy: the ipapi.co location lookup is now off by default; turn it on with “Look up visitor location” in the settings. The visitnotifications_lookup_location filter can override it per visit
- feat: suggested privacy policy text
- feat: uninstalling removes the plugin’s settings and stored data
- feat: add documentation link to plugin meta, publish language files
- change: the Visit Notifications box on posts and terms is now built in, with no third-party field library; existing per-page settings are kept as they are
- chore: tested up to WordPress 7.1, requires WordPress 6.5
- chore: contributors now include watchthedot
3.1.0
- chore: update branding to Watch The Dot / support.watchthedot.com
- fix: use static functions when $this is not referenced
This fixes a memory leak standard to using anonymous functions in classes - reactor: remove Plugin::__ helper method and instead use __ directly
- chore: tested up to WP 6.4
3.0.0
- First version released to WP Repo
For more information, see the plugin page