How I am tracking my WordPress plugin updates on my own update server

Ciprian on Thursday, June 29, 2023 in WordPress
Last modified on Tuesday, October 29, 2024

I am selling my plugins on CodeCanyon, and they all come with a lifetime updater feature. Most of my plugins, including Lighthouse and Active Analytics, are being updated on a monthly basis, and the update is pushed to all users, regardless of the current version available on CodeCanyon.

Sometimes they are synchronized, sometimes CodeCanyon is behind, but they always catch up at some point.

Since I implemented the updater, last year, I wanted to know how many users are using my plugin and what version they have. So, I started recording pings to my updater API and storing some basic details, such as the WordPress version and the URL.

I have my own API endpoint for this, and I am storing everything in a MySQL database. I even have a nice chart – ⁣11{11,15,17,13,7,7,10,18,9,6,12,9,12,100,10,9,13,10,3,8}8 – that shows how many distinct websites are pinging the updater:

11{11,15,17,13,7,7,10,18,9,6,12,9,12,100,10,9,13,10,3,8}8

This is the Sparks font. It uses percentages, so numbers cannot go higher than 100. But it’s a good indicator for me to see how many new users I am getting daily. So far, the growth looks good. I assume whenever I release a new version, I get a spike.

There’s more to this Sparks font, and the design is interesting:

Bars

thin: 123{30,60,90,60,100,50,45,20}456

medium: 123{30,60,90,60,100,50,45,20}456

wide: 123{30,60,90,60,100,50,45,20}456

extra wide: 123{30,60,90,60,100,50,45,20}456

Dots

extra small: 123{30,60,90,60,100,50,45,20}456

small: 123{30,60,90,60,100,50,45,20}456

medium: 123{30,60,90,60,100,50,45,20}456

large: 123{30,60,90,60,100,50,45,20}456

Lines

extra thin: 123{30,60,90,60,100,50,45,20}456

thin: 123{30,60,90,60,100,50,45,20}456

medium: 123{30,60,90,60,100,50,45,20}456

thick: 123{30,60,90,60,100,50,45,20}456

extrathick: 123{30,60,90,60,100,50,45,20}456

I have also implemented the same updater for the company I’m working with, for 2 plugins and one theme. My personal ones are 3 plugins and one theme. So far, I’m happy with the result.

What can I do with it, though?

Obviously, marketing. Basically, I can contact the owners of the websites and upsell them plugin modules. I don’t have any, though, and contacting them might be against GDPR regulations. So, the only purpose my stats have right now is just that: statistics. Data. Information. Power!

Knowing that my plugins are being used by, say, 3000 websites is a nice thing. What else can I do with the data?

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