I'll be the first to admit that the 1.16 update isn't as exciting as 1.15, but we needed to tackle some much-needed bug fixes and UX enhancements.

Here's what we changed.

Independent Analytics now reminds you to clear your cache after activating it on your site, which allows it to start recording views right away.

It can also detect if the REST API is currently blocked, which prevents it from recording any data. This has been an issue for quite a few users since launch. The new notification will make it clear there is an issue right away, and it has built-in detection for the most popular plugins that block REST API requests.

We also made the decision to sort the data table by Visitors instead of Views and have given the Visitors metric more visual priority in the interface. This seemed like a more logical way to look at the data i.e. I want to see how many people visited my site and then see how many pages they viewed, not the other way around.

Lastly, we were really excited to include Views Growth and Visitors Growth in version 1.15, but we found that they cluttered the table. We've decided to hide these columns by default as they aren't necessary for daily observation. You can display them again easily with the Edit Columns button.

Thanks for keeping up with our development progress!

If you've been following the roadmap, then you've already seen that scheduled email reports and WooCommerce analytics are on the way. We had to make a pit stop at version 1.16 to release these bug fixes and enhancements, but in version 1.17, we will be completely focused on those two features.