Skip to content

Browse the documentation

Install and activate

What PixelCapi needs from your server, how to install it, and the one thing to do straight after activating on a cached site.

updated

Install PixelCapi like any other WordPress plugin, activate it, and then purge your page cache. Nothing is tracked until you connect at least one platform, so activation is safe to do on a live site. WooCommerce is optional — the e-commerce events appear only when WooCommerce is active.

What your server needs

Requirement Minimum
WordPress 6.4
PHP 8.1
WooCommerce Optional. E-commerce events light up when it is active.
mbstring PHP extension Strongly recommended — see below

WooCommerce HPOS (High-Performance Order Storage) and the cart and checkout blocks are both declared compatible, and order data is read through WooCommerce’s CRUD methods rather than direct database queries. Action Scheduler is bundled with the plugin, so you do not need to install it separately; if another plugin already provides it, WordPress uses whichever copy is newest.

Install it

  1. Install and activate the plugin.
  2. Open its settings screen from the WordPress admin menu.
  3. Purge your page cache. On a cached site the previous HTML is still being served, and that HTML has no tracker in it.

That third step is not boilerplate. Purging after every plugin update is the single most common fix for “I installed it and nothing happens” — see Events don’t show.

About mbstring

PixelCapi lowercases names, cities and postcodes before hashing them, because the ad platforms require a normalised value. PHP’s plain strtolower() is byte-wise: it leaves every uppercase non-ASCII character untouched, so MĂDĂLINA becomes mĂdĂlina and hashes to something that matches nobody.

The plugin handles this in three ways, in order:

  • mbstring present — the correct multibyte lowercase is used.
  • mbstring absent and the value is pure ASCII — the plain function is byte-identical, so it is used and nothing is lost.
  • mbstring absent and the value contains non-ASCII characters — the field is omitted rather than sent wrongly folded, the omission is logged once per field, and it is reported in Diagnostics.

Missing data lowers your match rate. Wrong data lowers it and lies to you about why. If your host does not have mbstring, ask them to enable it — it is a standard extension.

What activation does not do

Activating the plugin does not start sending anything. There is no account to create, no OAuth screen, and no external service in the path: events go from your own WordPress server straight to the platform’s API. Until you paste credentials for a platform, nothing is sent anywhere.

Next

Was this page helpful?