We've published our first video update for version 2.1, so feel free to watch that or read the written version below.

https://youtu.be/VC7iEne_g-g

We spent most of the past two months working on the performance of the analytics dashboard. The big issue was that the dashboard was taking so long to load that it would crash. This was affecting sites with hundreds of thousands or millions of visitors per month.

We had to rewrite a lot of the back-end structure and queries, but the dashboard no longer crashes, even if the site gets millions of visitors every month. The dashboard also loads a couple of seconds faster for all users. The changes we've made in this release will also make it easier for us to improve performance further in the future.

We also made an optimization to the front-end. While the REST API request is asynchronous and doesn't affect UX or SEO, it was worrisome how long it took to load on some websites. This mainly affected sites with a large number of plugins installed. With our new optimizations, the REST API request completes in about 100-200ms regardless of how many plugins are installed.

For our Pro users, we added a new Order Referrers box to the WooCommerce Order page.

This will tell you the source of the sale, and if a Campaign URL was used, you'll also see the campaign parameters listed.

Since traffic from Google Ads comes from google.com, it's always been reported as "Google" in the Referrers report. This has made it impossible to differentiate between paid traffic and organic traffic. Now, any visitors that come from paid ads will be attributed to "Google Ads," while organic traffic will remain attributed to "Google."

We've also re-labeled the doubleclick.net domain to Google Display Network and added a new referrer type called "Ad."

If you want strict adherence to the GDPR, you may want to take advantage of the new option to refresh the visitor salt token daily.

This ensures that the encrypted IP addresses are hashed using a new salt every day, which limits the exposure of personal data in the event of successful decrypting. This comes at the expense of less accurate visitor counts.

We have more of the technical details here: https://independentwp.com/knowledgebase/data/refresh-visitor-salt/

We launched the first iteration of our developer API, which includes two functions. One function gets the views, visitors, and sessions from a given date range. The other function returns the same data but for a specific page/post.

You can learn more about the API functions here: https://independentwp.com/knowledgebase/developer/developer-api/

Lastly, we thought it would be cool to show a notification in the sidebar each time the plugin is updated. This will give you an easy way to access info about the latest updates so you can keep up with the latest changes.

In the next update, we want to get back to our old habit of lighter, faster releases. Our goal is to implement a handful of small features, such as:

We'll then be prepared to tackle larger features again, such as form submission tracking, which we are eager to implement.