Time zone, extra domains, retention, modules and the plan each needs, the two kinds of rules, and adding or restoring a site. Twenty minutes here decides what the next year of numbers means.

Site basics

Under Settings, Site, five values decide what every later number means:

Setting	Why it matters
time zone	Every report cuts its days at this zone's midnights. It starts as the zone your browser had at registration. Set it before the numbers accumulate: "yesterday" should mean your yesterday
other addresses	Hosts allowed to report under this site beside the main one. Traffic from a host the site does not own is refused at intake, so a second storefront on another domain belongs here. Subdomains of the main domain need nothing
retention	One of ten spans, from 30 days to ten years: 30, 90, 180, or 365 days, then two, three, four, five, seven, or ten years. A span above your allowance needs a plan change or retention add-on. Database retention makes expired rows eligible for deletion during background merges. Backups can retain earlier rows for their separate retention period
name	What the site is called across the panel and in email. It defaults to the domain, written as you typed it
blocked query parameters	An editable list of query parameter names to remove at intake, initialized with common credential names. The installation tag carries no list of its own: intake applies the site's configured list to every arriving event, with no extra fixed exclusions. Updates apply to the next event that arrives. No repasting is needed. Intake also applies the current site list before storage. Names only, never values, and separators do not matter: api_key covers apiKey

Modules: reports you switch on

Reports arrive in modules under Settings, Modules, so the menu holds what you use rather than everything that exists. Off means off everywhere: the screen, the API, and MCP all answer 404 for that site, the menu, the command palette, and your saved views hide the doors, and the core reports stop carrying the module's numbers, so campaigns, channels, and entry pages answer without revenue while ecommerce is off. What a switch does to stored data depends on the module. Performance stops storing the loading readings while it is off. Bots keeps counting in the background and only hides the screen until you turn it on again, so switching that module off does not erase its stored rows. Every module names the cheapest plan that includes it. Below that plan its switch is shown disabled beside the plan's name, and the module reads as off at every door.

Module	Answers	Plan	Default
bots	Recorded declared-bot traffic and its matching rule	Solo	on
properties	How custom event properties vary	Core	off
journeys	Which paths visits took, as an explorable flow	Growth	off
funnels	Progress through a sequence you declare	Growth	off
forecast	Modeled future direction, labeled as modeled	Growth	off
performance	Core Web Vitals from real visits, at the 75th percentile	Growth	off
ecommerce	Revenue, campaign credit, products, and coupons	Commerce	off

Performance is the one module with a snippet consequence: the measurements ride in the same single file either way, and the module decides whether the collector keeps them. Nothing on your pages changes when you flip it. Bots is the one module that owns stored rows, so switching it off asks for a confirmation, and the confirmation says what happens: the rows are hidden until you turn it on again, and nothing is deleted.

Rules: block and exclude are different

Settings, Rules holds two verbs that look alike and are not, and the difference is worth thirty seconds before you use either:

Blocking runs at intake. The event is refused and never exists. No report can bring it back, and the rule applies only from the moment you add it. It is the way to keep an internal path or an office address out of storage entirely.
Excluding runs when a report is read. The event is stored and filtered out, so it applies to data already collected, and putting it back is one click.

If you are unsure

You want an exclusion. It is reversible, retroactive, and wrong at worst by one click. A block that turns out too broad has already refused data nothing can recover.

A path rule that says "is" or "is not" is stored the way the collector stores a path: the trailing slash off and percent-encoding decoded, and the screen shows it that way after saving, so /thank-you/ becomes /thank-you and matches what the Pages report shows. "Starts with", "ends with", and "contains" keep the slash you typed, because "under /blog/" is a question the slash answers.

One consequence of excluding is worth knowing before a shop uses it. An order records the country, the campaign, and the referring site it came from, and nothing about a later page, browser, device, or system. An exclusion on a path, a browser, a device, or an operating system therefore cannot be applied to money, and Revenue, Products, and Coupons refuse rather than quietly ignore it, with the rule named and a link back to Rules. The Rules screen marks such a rule while the ecommerce module is on. Country, campaign, and referring-site exclusions apply everywhere.

More sites, and a deleted one

Settings, Sites lists every site on the account and is where an administrator adds one, from there or from the site switcher. The domain is the only thing required. The name defaults to it, and everything can change later. A domain another site already holds, here or on another account, is refused in words rather than saved twice. Only the first domain, at purchase, carries the DNS proof: from then on the collector refuses traffic from hostnames a site does not own, which is proof enough. How many live sites a plan carries is checked when you add one, never afterwards.

Deleting a site happens in the danger zone and takes two moves on purpose. The first takes the site out of the panel and stops counting at once, so a snippet still sitting in its pages writes nothing into a site you believe is gone. The Sites screen keeps it under Deleted, with the day it will be erased, and Restore brings it back counting for 30 days. The second move, after those days, erases its events, orders, bot records, and imported history, and nothing announces it. Nothing else brings a site back, so a deletion you did not mean is a visit to Sites the same month.

Check the wiring

When the settings stand, the Install screen verifies the whole path end to end: it watches the last minutes of traffic, names the hosts events came from, and lists recent recorded validation failures with their reasons and fixes. It cannot list requests blocked before that diagnostic stage. Then name a goal, and the panel starts answering questions instead of just counting.