Privacy

Privacy policy.

WP Footprint was designed with privacy as a starting constraint, not an afterthought. This page lists exhaustively what the plugin sends to WP Footprint Pulse, what it doesn't send, and how you can erase everything.

When does data leave your site?

Never by default. The plugin runs locally and stores its results on your site. No data leaves your server until you have explicitly checked the "Contribute to WP Footprint Pulse" box in the plugin settings.

On first enrollment only

Once, when you turn opt-in on, the plugin registers itself with WP Footprint Pulse via a cryptographic challenge. This exchange uses:

  • Your domain name, sent once to prove this site is yours (Pulse calls back your admin-ajax.php to verify an Ed25519 signature).
  • The URL of your admin-ajax endpoint, used only for this verification callback, never kept after enrollment.
  • The domain is then kept on our server for audit and re-verification, but is never displayed publicly nor attached to your scans. All subsequent submissions use only an opaque identifier.

What is sent (if opted in)

For each scan you choose to share:

  • A random identifier (64 hexadecimal characters), generated locally at install time. It's this identifier, not your domain, that accompanies every scan.
  • The WordPress version, the PHP version, and possibly the MySQL/MariaDB version.
  • The active theme slug (e.g. twentytwentyfour).
  • A hash of the sorted list of other installed plugins (to detect problematic combinations without knowing the actual list).
  • For each scanned plugin and for the active theme: their slug, version, and the five measured deltas (time, memory, SQL, assets, external HTTP).

What is never sent

  • The URL of your pages, your content, your visitors' IP addresses.
  • The admin email or any user email.
  • The content of your site (posts, pages, media, database).
  • Your WordPress credentials or any third-party credentials.
  • No advertising identifier, no browser fingerprint: there's no client-side tracking.

How data is protected in transit

All requests to WP Footprint Pulse use HTTPS and each scan is signed locally with your site's private Ed25519 key (generated at install time, never transmitted). Pulse verifies the signature with the public key registered at enrollment: there is no shared secret. A timestamp included in the signature prevents replay attacks.

Data retention

  • Raw scans are kept for at most 1095 days, after which they are automatically purged.
  • Anonymous aggregations (medians per version, daily snapshots) are kept indefinitely: their aggregation is WP Footprint Pulse.

Member account (optional)

The plugin works without an account. If you create one to find your sites and their scans, we keep:

  • your name and email address, to identify you and write to you (address confirmation, forgotten password, nothing else);
  • your password, only as an encrypted hash (bcrypt), never in plain text;
  • the list of sites you linked from the plugin, which gives you access to their private and public scans;
  • a strictly necessary session cookie to keep you logged in (no consent required).

You can delete your account at any time from My account > Settings: it is erased immediately. Your sites are then unlinked and their scans stay on the barometer, anonymous as they have always been.

Your rights

The random identifier representing you on WP Footprint Pulse is known only to your WP Footprint instance and to our database. You can:

  • Disable sending at any time in the plugin settings (uncheck the box → no more data is sent). It's immediate and reversible.
  • Uninstall the plugin: no new data is sent. Already-received scans stay aggregated anonymously (the opaque identifier is only used for deduplication) until the retention period above expires.
  • Request deletion of all data associated with your identifier by writing to us (see « Contact » below). Deletion is processed manually within 30 days. To do this, retrieve your identifier from the plugin settings before uninstalling.

Cookies & analytics

The WP Footprint Pulse website (the public ranking, distinct from the WordPress plugin) measures its traffic with Plausible Analytics, a privacy-friendly European tool. No advertising cookies, no social network cookies, no remarketing pixels.

Which cookies are set?

No analytics cookies. Plausible sets no cookies and stores nothing on your device. The only cookies used are strictly necessary technical ones (session, form protection, member area login).

What is measured

Plausible counts page views, where visits come from (referring site), country, device type and browser, as aggregated statistics only. Your IP address is only used to compute an anonymous identifier that changes every day, then it is discarded: it is never stored. Data is hosted in the European Union and is never sold or combined with other sources. No consent is therefore required, which is why there is no cookie banner.

Opting out

Any content blocker (uBlock Origin, Brave, etc.) is enough to exclude your visits from the statistics. The site keeps working normally.

Contact

For any question about your data, write to [email protected].

Last updated: 04 November 2026.