Moving Away From Google Analytics

Taking control of traffic analytics generated from my websites, and protect

ing readers and users from Google Analytics. Let's dig in.

What is Google Analytics?

Google Analytics is a service offered by Google that analyzes web traffic and generates reports based on user activity and overall website traffic. According to BuiltWith.com, there are over 28 Million live sites that use Google Analytics, and an estimated 1,126 of those websites are Maldivian (builtwith.com analytics page). Some of the few notable sites are:

• bankofmaldives.com.mv
• tourism.gov.mv
• immigration.gov.mv
• sun.mv
• edition.mv
• avas.mv
• cnm.mv
• and almost any other news website under the sun.

Now Google Analytics is a great service and has been around since 2005. Millions of websites and large Fortune500 companies use Google Analytics for their web analytics to see how their website is performing globally. Google Analytics provides in-depth analysis of the traffic generated to help give insight to companies that will help them perform better.

I've personally used Google Analytics on this blog and my main domain website, as well as installed it on several other websites for friends and in my professional work. For me, opening Google Analytics every now and then for fun to see how the websites are performing, as well as finding where my users are coming from was not a fun experience. The Google Analytics portal is slow, clunky, filled with charts and numbers and advertiser jargon that don't really make sense to me.

I wanted an simpler alternative.

There are no free web analytics services offered on the internet, other than Google Analytics. Now one might wonder why Google, a multi-billion dollar company is offering a service for free. Well it's because they are making money out of the data generated by your website traffic data. Yeah they are definitely using it for their own benefit.

So now I must self-host. On my journey to find my next web analytics software, I found many and was quickly disappointed by the results. Most of the software were either created years ago or does not have a nice admin interface. If I am to look at my analytics, I want it to at least look good.

I stumbled up on Fathom Analytics and got very excited just by looking at the website and reading through all of their blog posts about the development of the service itself. But it cost money.

Moving on...

Introducing Plausible Analytics!

Google was not helping. Time to go to Reddit. One search, first result, Plausible Analytics.

Now this looks clean. This is essentially the only information I actually want for my websites. Here is the Google Analytics dashboard for reference.

To quote Plausible Analytics,

Google Analytics is frustrating to use, difficult to understand, slow to load and privacy-invasive too.

Yes, Google Analytics make your website load slower. The Google Analytics script is said to be almost 44KB large. Now 44KB is a lot for an analytics script, and since its Javascript, it's even worse.

I'll quote Plausible Analytics again here,

Plausible is lightweight analytics. Our script is 45 times smaller than Google Analytics. Your page weight will be cut down, your site will load faster and you'll reduce your carbon footprint for a greener and more sustainable web. A site with 10,000 monthly visitors can save 4.5 kg of CO2 emissions per year by switching.

Use Plausible Analytics and you're environmentally conscious.. 🌲🌲🌲

Lets Install

There is nothing fancy here sadly. Plausible Analytics provides a guide on how to set it up. It's all Docker based so make sure you have Docker and docker-compose installed.

The only extra steps I did were to create a new subdomain for my server, point it to the IP address and configure the web server to direct all traffic coming to the subdomain to the Plausible Analytics Docker container.

If you know anything about web analytics, you know that all you have to do is add the necessary script tag to every single page on your website. Thankfully, Plausible presents you with the tag after adding a new site.

Instead of showing you the next screen, I'll do you one better. I'll use Plausible's shared links to embed the analytics page into this post.

blog.athfan.com Website Analytics

Conclusion

My personal websites don't generate enough traffic for my server to struggle with running Plausible Analytics. I get probably 2 readers a month. And that is almost always me and a friend of mine. While I did not touch on everything what Plausible can do, for me, I don't need it to do anything more other than provide web analytics. Plausible is mobile responsive and is a treat to even look at on a mobile phone.