What’s new in Koko Analytics 2.3

Posted on Apr 7, 2026 by Danny van Kooten.

Version 2.3 of Koko Analytics was just pushed to the WordPress.org servers. This release brings a handful of user-facing improvements to the dashboard and several under-the-hood changes to improve database performance and reliability.

Drag and drop your dashboard components

The most visible change in this release is the ability to reorder your dashboard components through drag and drop. If you prefer seeing your referrers before your top pages (or if you have additional components from a plugin like Koko Analytics Pro), you can now simply drag them into the order you prefer by grabbing the table header.

Your preferred order is saved automatically and persists across sessions.

Direct link to pages

The top pages table now shows a small external link icon next to each page title. Clicking it takes you directly to that page on your site, making it easier to check on your most popular content without having to copy-paste URLs.

Improved dashboard styling

The totals section at the top of the dashboard has been split into three separate cards for visitors, pageviews and realtime pageviews. The realtime card now has a pulsing green dot to make it stand out. These changes make better use of horizontal space on larger screens and keep the dashboard looking clean on smaller ones.

Under the hood

While most of the changes above are immediately visible, a significant amount of work went into the internals:

• Improved migration runner. Database migrations now use a numeric versioning scheme with a proper locking mechanism. This makes migrations more reliable, especially on sites where multiple requests hit the server simultaneously during an update.
• Atomic upserts. Inserting normalized values (like URL paths and referrer URLs) into the database now uses an atomic INSERT IGNORE approach instead of checking for existence first. This eliminates a class of race conditions and simplifies the code.
• Faster pruning. Deleting old data and cleaning up orphaned database rows now uses JOIN-based queries with proper indexes instead of looping through rows one by one. For sites with a lot of historical data, this can be a significant performance improvement.
• Better bot detection. The tracking script now also checks for headless browsers (Puppeteer, Cypress, Nightmare) and skips tracking if the page is opened in a background tab. This should reduce noise in your analytics from automated tools.

Other changes

• The [koko_analytics_counter] shortcode now works correctly when used outside of post content (for example in widget areas) and formats its output according to your site’s locale.
• The settings page now restricts the tab query parameter to registered tabs only.
• A new koko_analytics_print_html_comments filter allows you to disable the HTML comments that Koko Analytics adds to your page source containing version info.

Update today

Koko Analytics 2.3 is available now on WordPress.org and through automatic updates in your WordPress dashboard.

If you’d like even more insights from your analytics — like geo-location, custom events and email reports — check out Koko Analytics Pro.

Tags: News, Releases