Green Orb Web Design

Installing the plugin

1. Upload the greenorb-statistics folder to /wp-content/plugins/, or install the ZIP
   via Plugins → Add New → Upload Plugin.
2. Activate it through the Plugins screen.
3. A GreenOrb Statistics menu appears in your WordPress admin sidebar. Tracking
   begins automatically — there is nothing to embed in your theme.

Upgrading to Pro

Buy Pro on the website, then download greenorb-statistics-pro.zip from your customer portal — the link is in your order confirmation email.

Install it the way you would any plugin ZIP and activate it. You do not need to remove the free version first — Pro installs to its own folder, notices the free copy and switches it off for you, then tells you it has done so. Once it is active, open GreenOrb Statistics → 🔑 Licence and paste your key.

(It only works in that direction. Activating the free plugin while Pro is running is refused, with a note explaining why — everything in free is already part of Pro, and running both would take the site down.)

Your settings and statistics are kept — the two builds share the same tables, so nothing is lost in the change and there is nothing to migrate.

Pro features stay switched off until a licence is activated, so if every Pro report is still missing after installing, check 🔑 Licence for your status. From then on, updates arrive through the normal WordPress Updates screen.

Using one licence across several sites

Every tier above the single-site licence lets you activate the same key on more than one site — useful if you look after sites for clients. Each site’s 🔑 Licence screen speaks only for that site: whether Pro is active there, and the controls to re-check or release it. Anything about the licence itself — which sites are activated, how many your tier allows, renewals — lives in your customer portal, deliberately, so a site you have built for someone else is not showing them your account.

Release a site before you tear it down. An activation belongs to the site, not to the plugin folder, so deleting the plugin, wiping the install or rebuilding from a backup does not hand the slot back. The site disappears and the activation stays, counted against your limit with nothing left to release it. Press Deactivate on this site on the 🔑 Licence screen first, then tear the site down. It takes a moment and saves an awkward conversation later.

The same applies to staging copies. Cloning a live site clones its licence state too, so the copy will try to validate as a second activation. Deactivate on the clone unless you actually mean to spend a slot on it.

If you ever rotate your key, every site still holding the old one will report the licence as no longer active. Rotation deliberately kills the old key string while keeping its activations, so the fix is to paste the new key on each site — the plugin recognises the situation, releases the stale activation and re-activates in a single step. You do not need to visit the customer portal.

If a site is already gone, you can free the slot yourself. You do not need the site, and you do not need us. Open your Polar customer portal — the link is in your order confirmation email, and on any site whose licence has stopped working the 🔑 Licence screen links straight to it — and you will find your licence key with the list of sites currently activated against it. Remove the one you no longer have, and the slot is free immediately.

That is the route to use for a client who has left, a host that has been cancelled, or any site you can no longer sign in to. Get in touch only if the portal will not let you — nothing is ever stuck for good.

The first-run setup wizard

The first time you activate GreenOrb Statistics, a short, skippable setup wizard opens.
It walks you through the handful of choices that matter most — privacy & data
(who to exclude, retention, Do Not Track), email reports (a scheduled traffic
summary in your inbox, plus optional traffic-spike alerts), and geography
detection — and writes straight to the plugin's normal settings, so anything you
choose here can be changed later under Settings & Privacy.

If an affiliate plugin (e.g. ThirstyAffiliates) is detected — or cloaked affiliate
paths are already configured — an extra Affiliates step appears with the link
path pre-filled. Sites without affiliate links never see that step.

You can safely skip the wizard and configure things later; tracking works with
sensible defaults out of the box.

Finding your way around

GreenOrb Statistics is built as an interconnected web, not a set of flat pages. Two
rules cover almost everything:

1. Almost everything in a table is a link. Visitor chips, post titles,
View → buttons, journey routes — if it identifies something, clicking it takes
you to that thing's own page.

2. Every drill-down has a breadcrumb trail. When you land on a detail page,
the breadcrumbs at the top step you back exactly the way you came — you can
explore freely without getting lost.

The drill-down map

Click this…	…anywhere it appears	To see
A coloured visitor chip (e.g. a1b2c3d4)	Overview, Visitors, Visits Log, Sessions, session/post detail, WooCommerce abandoned-cart tables	That visitor's full profile: every visit, session and journey
View → in a Details column	Sessions, Journeys, per-post visitor lists, Content tables	The full session path, journey route, or per-post report
A post/page title	Content tables, Overview	The live page on your site (opens in a new tab) — use the adjacent View → for its stats detail
Visits → on a country or city row	Geography	The Visits Log filtered to that location
A referrer name	Sessions, Referrers	The referring website itself (new tab) — handy for checking who linked to you
A Quick Navigation card or stat card	Overview	The matching full report

A visitor chip and its "full profile" are always a pseudonymous signature
— a rotating, salted hash, never a name, email or IP — so a profile is just
everything that one signature did, not a record of an identifiable person. See
Understanding your metrics.

Controls you'll find on every report

• Date picker — Today / 7 / 30 / 90 days, a custom range, or "last N days".
  Your chosen range follows you as you navigate between reports. Pick a
  single day (Today, or one custom date) and every trend chart switches from
  day-by-day to hour-by-hour, with the previous day overlaid for comparison.
• ⚙ Customize Layout — drag panels into a different order, hide the ones you
  don't use, and resize them. Each report remembers your arrangement per-user — see
  Customising the layout below for the full tour.
• Sortable columns — headers with arrows sort the table; click again to flip
  the direction.
• Filter pills (where relevant) — e.g. Device and Engagement on Sessions; the
  summary cards follow the active filter.
• Export — CSV export on the Reports dashboard, Visits Log and post detail;
  PDF export from the Overview's top bar.
• Breadcrumbs — your trail back out of any drill-down.

Customising the layout

Every major screen — the Overview and most reports — has a ⚙ Customize Layout
button in its top-right corner. It opens a drawer listing every panel on that
page, so each screen becomes something you arrange rather than something you're
given:

• Drag to reorder — grab the ⠿ handle and drag a panel up or down the list.
  Top-to-bottom in the drawer is top-to-bottom on the page.
• Set panel widths — the three width buttons make a panel full width (▰),
  half width (▰▰) or one-third width (▰▰▰). Neighbouring panels with the
  same width share a row: set two panels to half and they sit side by side; three
  one-third panels form a compact 3-across row. It's the quickest way to turn a
  long scroll into a dense, dashboard-style page.
• Show or hide panels — click the eye (👁) to hide a panel you don't use, and
  click it again (🙈) to bring it back. Hidden panels keep their place in the
  drawer, so nothing is ever lost.
• Locked panels — a padlock (🔒) marks the panels a screen always keeps
  visible (on the Overview: the Period Summary and the Traffic Chart). You can
  still reorder and resize those — you just can't hide them.
• Save Layout / Reset to defaults — Save Layout stores your arrangement
  immediately; Reset to defaults returns that screen to its factory layout
  without touching any other screen.

Two details worth knowing:

• Layouts are per-user and per-screen. Your arrangement is saved against your
  own WordPress user, so an editor and an administrator can each shape the same
  report differently — and every screen remembers its own layout independently.
• Updates never disturb your arrangement. When a plugin update adds a new
  panel to a screen, it simply appears at the end of your saved layout, ready to
  be dragged into place.

Requirements

• WordPress 5.8 or newer (WordPress 7.0+ is required only for the built-in Ask AI
  assistant).
• PHP 7.4 or newer.
• WooCommerce is optional — the WooCommerce reports only load when WooCommerce
  is active; everything else works on any site.

Good practice, and getting out of trouble

Nothing here is specific to this plugin — it is what any WordPress site should
have in place before installing anything.

Before you install or update a plugin, take a backup of your files and your
database, and try it on a staging copy first if you have one. Most hosts provide
both in a couple of clicks. This is worth the minute it takes for any plugin, from
anyone.

If the site misbehaves after activating

GreenOrb Statistics ships an emergency kill switch. Add this one line to
wp-config.php:

define( 'GREENORB_STATISTICS_DISABLED', true );

The whole plugin goes inert — no tracking, no admin pages, no background work —
without deactivating it, so nothing is uninstalled and no data is lost. It is
deliberately a wp-config.php constant rather than a setting, because
wp-config.php can still be edited over FTP or through your host's file manager
when wp-admin itself is unreachable. Remove the line to bring the plugin back.

That gives you a way to rule the plugin in or out in under a minute, without
waiting on support and without touching your data.

What the plugin does on its own

• Crash fuse. If three fatal errors are traced to GreenOrb Statistics, it
  deactivates itself rather than leaving your site down. You get a working site
  and a note explaining what happened.
• Failures are contained. A report that cannot render is caught and logged
  rather than being allowed to take the page — or the site — with it.
• Error log. Settings → Diagnostics keeps the plugin's own recent errors,
  with the environment checks, so you can see what it thinks went wrong before
  contacting anyone.

Where your data lives

All tracking and reporting happens on your own server. Visitor data is stored in
custom tables in your site's database (prefixed greenorb_statistics_) and is never
sent to an external analytics service. The only feature that ever contacts an
outside service is the optional Ask AI assistant, and only when you use it —
see Ask AI.

Finding your way around

The plugin is organised into a top tab bar and a left-hand menu:

• Overview — the at-a-glance dashboard (see Overview dashboard).
• Traffic / Audience / Content / Behaviour / WooCommerce / Ask AI / Admin — grouped
  menus across the top that mirror the left sidebar.
• Customize Layout — most report screens let you show, hide, and reorder their
  panels with the ⚙ Customize Layout button (top-right). Your arrangement is
  saved per screen.
• Date range picker — every report except the Overview page has a date
  selector near the top (Last 7 /
  30 / 90 days, This month, or a custom range). Changing it updates every panel on
  the page.

GreenOrb also shows you numbers without opening its menu at all — a Traffic Summary
widget on your WordPress Dashboard, a stats box in the post editor, and live
counts in the admin bar. See
At a glance.

Next: Understanding your metrics →