SlimStat 6 and Pro 3 Upgrade Guide

SlimStat 6 focuses on report correctness, lower database work and safer maintenance. SlimStat Pro 3 is its companion add-on and requires Free 6.0.0 or newer. This guide describes the v6/Pro v3 target; check the available download version before upgrading.

The complete release notes are in the Free and Pro readme files. Update Free first: Pro 3 does not load on Free older than 6.0.0, and the Pro updater holds back a Pro release that needs a newer Free than the one installed.

What changes for site owners?

Change	Why it matters
Shortcode Playground and live counters	Preview reports, copy/test shortcodes and control public versus restricted output
Heatmaps page and opt-in capture	Free lists clicked pages; Pro adds visual click/scroll views, visitor segments and CSV downloads
WooCommerce Ecommerce dashboard	Set up Free sales, product and journey reporting; Pro adds deeper breakdowns and sharing
UTM link builder and expandable reports	Build tagged URLs and inspect campaign/channel source totals
Free sample email and clearer Pro scheduling	Test a real weekly sample; choose Pro reports by name and stop schedules with Off
Clearer admin and empty states	See why a report is empty and which setup step to take next
SlimStat menu above Appearance, “New” badges for 15 days	Find the new pages after updating; the badges fade on their own
”Enable CDN” setting removed	Sites that had it on record again; the tracker is always served from your site
Chart totals and buckets share a query	Less repeated database work when opening reports
Corrected previous-period and funnel calculations	Comparisons and drop-offs reflect the intended visits
Consent upgrades update the original pageview	Accepting consent after page load no longer needs to count the visit twice
Events archive before parent pageviews are deleted	Archived interaction history is preserved during successful archive purges
Free Channels and UTM Campaigns reports	Compare the top two channels and campaigns after acquisition schema setup; Pro lists every row
Pro network and author report corrections	Network totals and author emails use their intended scope
Pro license and update API	Activation and updates use `my.wp-slimstat.com`

New Free 6 installations enable bot exclusion and asynchronous report loading. Existing sites retain their settings. Privacy settings still need configuration: IP anonymization, IP hashing and GDPR Compliance Mode are off by default.

Upgrade checklist

Back up WordPress and the analytics database, including any external database and archive tables.
Test on staging if you have a large database, custom reports, Multisite or external storage.
Update Free to 6 first, then Pro to 3. Keep both active.
Open WordPress admin and review notices. On the first admin visit SlimStat creates any missing tables and small indexes, as in every release. A notice on the Dashboard, Plugins and Updates screens says when a Migration step is waiting; once migrations are done, a SlimStat 6 card on the Dashboard and Plugins screens says what is new.
Open SlimStat → Migration and review each proposed step. Required migrations and optional table rebuilds are different operations.
Test a recorded visit, consent choices, a goal and any Pro feature you use. Compare the same date range and filters before and after.

Are the migrations automatic?

The Migration screen waits for an explicit action. Fresh installs start with the current schema; upgraded installations can have pending column migrations. Required steps only add columns and indexes, including the three new indexes over page addresses and event notes, and change or remove no data; the release notes measure about 8 seconds per 440,000 rows on MySQL 8. The screen warns if a MyISAM analytics table will pause tracking while a step runs. Optional user-agent backfill and utf8mb4 conversion can alter, scan or rebuild tables and are not included in Apply All. Schedule them during a quiet period and retain a backup.

Database size, engine and online DDL support affect duration and locking. Do not assume a timing measured on another site applies to yours. To postpone the migration runner, an administrator can define SLIMSTAT_DISABLE_MIGRATIONS as true in wp-config.php. This does not disable tracking or ordinary schema reconciliation.

SlimStat 6 also includes Enable UTM and channel reports, which adds eight columns to live and archive pageview tables. Existing rows stay unattributed; Channels labels them Unassigned. On Multisite, complete setup for each participating site. Set up campaign reports.

Ecommerce setup and heatmap capture are separate opt-ins. Additional heatmap recording starts off; its tables are created on first use. Ecommerce setup adds its own projection and visit index, then imports orders in background jobs. Review Ecommerce requirements and heatmap controls.

Published shortcodes now ignore URL/form filters and preserve surrounding report state. Personal data and user reports are hidden from unauthorized visitors; safe aggregate counters remain public. Recheck existing embedded reports as both an authorized user and a signed-out visitor, including shared-cache behavior.

Why might my numbers change?

Corrections can reduce duplicated anonymous pageviews, consent-upgrade pageviews and overlapping funnel counts. Previous-period chart totals and network membership can also change. A lower number is not automatically lost tracking: compare equivalent periods and test an actual visitor journey before drawing a conclusion.

Numbers can also go up. Sites that had Enable CDN on start recording again: the setting is removed because it loaded a tracker file that did not exist. If you copied the snippet for tracking external pages, replace it with the current one, which points at your own site.

What do the performance measurements prove?

The v6 development benchmark compared database work on a 150,000-row reference corpus. For the measured weekly chart, row-read counters fell from 304,454 to 152,227 and sort rows from 212,301 to 106,141. These are database operation counters, not page-load timings or a promise that every report is twice as fast.

The release notes also report option-write reductions from 2.83 to 1.07 per stored pageview and 1.75 to 0.07 per refused bot, and healthy-install schema reconciliation from 14 statements to 4. These are workload-specific operation counts, not speed percentages or hosting-capacity guarantees.

The optimization was checked separately from intentional reporting corrections. The development qualification records also contain pending release gates; benchmark results alone do not establish release readiness. Measure your own host, data size, date ranges and Pro configuration.

Sources: the Free source and changelog and the v6 performance/qualification review. The website repository’s docs/v6-content-review.md records the reviewed source revisions and local evidence paths.

Security and compatibility

Free 6 fixes an authenticated SQL-injection path associated with the optional Posts and Pages report column. Pro 3 fixes cross-site visitor-data access by subsite administrators on Multisite, affecting Pro through 2.0.1. Network-wide reports now need network-management permission and an explicit validated scope. Use the release notes for the affected conditions; a website documentation update does not install these fixes.

General compatibility remains PHP 7.4+ and WordPress 5.6+; WordPress 7.1.2 is the current test target, not the minimum. Ecommerce additionally requires WooCommerce 8.3+, its scheduler and a 64-bit PHP runtime, plus WooCommerce’s own requirements. Check the actual packages and back up before updating.

Continue setup

Install Free, activate Pro, review database changes, or ask for help.